Yeah – I’m still here. I am still Daddy Runs a Lot – I am still running as often as possible, and the kids . . . well, they’re still there. What I haven’t been doing much, at all, is writing. Not here, not at that other blog. Heck, I’ve barely been reading as of late (honestly, it’s in reading where I get the motivation to write – usually starting with a fun idea whilst leaving a comment on someone’s blog post and thinking “oh, hey, I like the creative process”)1. Life is busy – perhaps my life is exceptionally busy – and writing, well, writing just hasn’t been the priority.
But my dream last night kind of forced priorities to the forefront of my thought process. And I wanted to document things before the details drifted away like all dreams eventually do.
In my dream, I woke2, and I was a senior in college. I was in the townhouse I shared with three other guys, the outside temperature was chilly, but the window was open, I was nestled, happy and warm, under the covers. I didn’t want to get out of bed – I’d just skip my 8am class. Chances are I was awake for the day – I’ve never been one to get myself back to sleep – sure, I could just lie in bed, and that might feel good – but I seldom actually fall asleep once my eyes open. I’d get up, eventually – maybe play some Madden, and then beg Monique for her notes from engineering lab.
But then I thought that was stupid. See, I was in my 20 year old body, living my 20-year-old life. With my 41 year old mind and memories. I’m paying for college – not going to skip “just because.”
Realization came in full, now. I was 20 years old. I had my 20-year-old metabolism, but with my current work ethic. I crave and enjoy working out. I understand diet’s effect on the body. I have self control when it comes to dessert.
I have a work ethic3.
The end of my college career would end on an academic high note, as opposed to the “limp to the finish line” which was my reality. And I’d be my healthiest, physically, as a young man (as opposed to my reality, which I’d say I hit my apex a year or two ago, firmly entwined in middle age. Though I’m hardly “out of shape” these days, my younger self, well, I commonly used my height4 to mask my weight issues).
I’d be able to end a truly unhealthy-for-me relationship before things got too out of hand (at this time in my life, I was preparing to propose to my girlfriend . . . only, well, lets just say that we weren’t very good for each other – there is a ton more to process here, but that’s, perhaps, not for something this public). Knowing what I know now, I had the whole world open to me.
And then, outside of dream world and in the real world, my daughter flopped over and smacked me in the face, rousing me from the dream.
Only, which was the dream? Because, for the next 20-30 minutes or so, I was convinced that I had been sent to my younger body with my current mind & memories, but now was dreaming of my life before then: a dream within a dream within a dream.
I started plotting how I could ensure I had the family I had, now, whilst avoiding many of the mistakes I’ve made. Because mistakes (say it with me in a Sinatra voice)? I’ve made a few.
Then it got me to thinking of time travel in the Connie Willis world (hey, my brain is nothing if not perverted random), where it’s possible to travel back/forth in time, but it is an inexact science – if you try to head back to witness a history-changing historic event, you’ll either show up impossibly before, or just after the event. Or arrive in a location so far away that you can’t get to witness the event in time to possibly affect anything.
Then I started thinking about time travel in the Stephen King world, where time really doesn’t want you to fuck with it and if you manage to alter a historic event, Stephen King things happen to the world.
Was this one, pivotal morning, where the climate was perfect and my motivation was low, the singularity from which my life, as I know it, stemmed?
Was this moment my Demon Reach from the Harry Dresden world?
All I knew what that however much my daughter flopping her arm onto the middle of my face in the middle of the night angers me in the moment it happens – even if I feel I’d spend less time thinking “I wish I wouldn’t have…”, had I lived my 20’s with the wisdom I have in my 40’s, I definitely wouldn’t want to change just where I am right now.