|
Time-machine strategies for personal growth and wealth acquisition.
By Greg Crackpot
 I am 36ish. I have middling career in an idiotic industry. However, being clever, I have hatched a flawless plan using a time machine. IF ONLY I HAD A GODDAMN TIME MACHINE.
HIGH SCHOOL
Set the time machine to 1983. Am now a 36ish year old mind/soul in a 14-year old’s coltish and shrimpy body.
First things first – Buy some normal clothes. Jeans and some oxford shirts. Nothing crazy. I do keep the checkerboard sweater vest, as it is kind of retro, though no one knows it. Forego topsiders and cargo pants. Do not long for Ray-Bans.
Get a haircut, with hair off the ears, or perhaps let it grow long. Just not the length it is now. Although, layoff the conditioner. I don’t need it.
Now that I realize that high school is a pleasant way to pass the hours between nine and three, I apply myself. I do not fidget. I do my homework, which is a cinch.
I try to not to sprinkle no many 36 year oldism (doing book reports on Don DeLillo, speaking knowledgably about the effects of cocaine, or about certain aspects of the female anatomy. Although, do not appear to have too much of an informed prospective of the career prospects of the Thompson Twins or Bananarama.) in my dealings with my fellow students, my teachers and my family.
I also am a hit with the ladies, as I am now conscience of the limited charm of wearing the same sweater everyday or jeans bleached in a random pattern. I will not attempt to blow in girls’ ears when slow dancing. I will talk more and share my love of fart jokes with a close and trusted circle of friends.
I will not be a goon, and will work diligently in moving Kim out of friendship mode and into a higher level of being mode. (Of course, I am actually 36, so maybe this is creepy. Okay, so it’s a lot creepy.)
I will not pursue a certain E, as she was, in retrospect, a skank. When Chrisse gives me a ride in her VW, I will endeavor to speak. Not that it would lead anywhere, but merely as a matter of pride.
Taking my money from my department-store vacuuming (where my boss was literally retarded. Maybe I try to hook up some better jobs) and sandwich making jobs, I invest in Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Apple, and IBM. Not Commodore.
I will take acid with Sean and Christian. I will smoke a lot less pot. Or maybe not. Maybe my 36ish mind will be able to handle it.
COLLEGE
With my now 40 year old mind making hash of the piddling obligations of High School, colleges and universities are pounding my door down.
This is where I wander into realms that might be considered illegal, or at least morally wiffy.
For, during college (Harvard?), I cynically crib the text of Chuck Palahniuk’s first four published novels from copies smuggled into the time machine. There maybe some time paradox here that will make the universe blow up, but that doesn’t concern me now, as living bi-temporally has released me from the petty bourgeoisie concerns of morality. I am beyond good and evil. But a motherfucker still needs to eat.
 I do manage to plagiarize Michel Houellebecq’s excellent essay on H.P. Lovecraft -- Against the World, Against Life -- for a 100-level English class, causing a stir within the Academe.
I get “Fight Club” published a full ten years before it is actually published “back home”.
Why Chuck Palahniuk? Not because I necessarily think he’s amazing (I liked “Fight Club” okay), I just think you can always find a publisher for that sort of thing, and there’ll always be a group of pained hipsters hungry for middle-brow hooey. Like me. There is also the need for a writing style that isn’t too complicated and deep, so when I’m interviewed by Elle, I can fake it.
Flush from the profits from “Fight Club” I drop out of Harvard. A film version is made in 1994, staring Billy Zane. It does poorly.
POST-COLLEGE
For the next three years I publish one Palahniuk/Crackpot novel a year. A diesel mechanic from Eugene Oregon goes missing. People know him as Chuck.
When people ask me when the next the book is coming out, I tell them they’re all wet, ‘cause novels is a dead sucker scene. I punch Joyce Carol Oates in the neck.
I got me a Rock and Roll band. (At Harvard, I learn to play guitar and manage to find a crew of four competent and cute musicians that do EXACTLY as I say.) My band? Well, we’re called THE ARCTIC MONKEYS. (This is like 1993.)
It the start of the long grunge winter, but we rise above with our slashing guitars and biting lyrics. People go nuts. I get richer. (Even more richer when I crank out the screenplay for a totally sweet-ass film called “Dumb and Dumber”. Nice!)
 I retire to Martinique, where I run for Prime Minister. I win, and promptly free the slaves, or whatever. Then I invent the hypertext markup language, and the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.
Thus I start the global networking revolution, allowing people to share files remotely. This new informail network is called the Wow Wow Wow. A computer scientist at CERN goes missing.
I come back to the states, tan and fabulous, date and bed most women I meet.
Bored and sickened by my hideous Dorian Gray existence, I take a job at an ad agency, where I meet a woman named Paula, whom I am mysteriously attracted to. We marry, have two kids, Ruby and Owen, and have a giant fucking RANCH in Marin County. We quit our jobs in and retire to the ranch, where I write the score for what was Henry Brant’s Pulitzer Prize winning composition Ice Field, that is until I did a Palahniuk on him.
I am now 36, with the mind of a 72 year old. Which isn’t far off from my current condition.
ADDENDUM
How, using inflation, one makes money on time travel.
 I call it negative money laundering. In 2035, when it cost $75 to buy a cup of coffee, you take out, say, $200,000 in cash. You exchange NEW BILLS for OLD BILLS, and put ‘em in a laundry sack. (Note: this will cause suspicion. But I think legal problems can be avoided. To whit:
If the brand of time travel you’re rocking in the Slaughter House Five variety, that is you can skip back and forth along the time line of your own life, you can choose to avoid jail pretty easily by not showing up for that era of your life. Again, you are a time traveling motherfucker, and are above petty moral cause and effect. NICE!
Or:
You’re in a multiverse scenario, where whenever you drop out of a particular time continuum, the universe splinters to baby universes to allow the cause and effect of your actions to continue naturally. In this case, the not portable you, the one stuck in the flow of time is your pasty. And you know what? FUCK THAT DUDE. It’s not your fault he’s a sucker trapped on an inexorable hell ride to some punk ass omega point.
Again, day to day ethics and morality…out the window. No more: “Daddy ate the last pudding cup” HORSESHIT. (And daddy gets to eat the last pudding cup because the motherfucker paid for the last pudding cup, sweetie.)
Although, if you met your multiverse doppelganger, and had sex with him or her, would that be considered incest? Or masturbation? The mind reels!)
Take the laundry sack two years into the past, exchange the newer bills for older bills, go back two years, etc. Next thing you know, your 14, it’s 1984, and you are sitting on 200 grand of 80s money. You buy a condo in Malibu. Easy as pie.
Things I would buy
The Screaming Blue Messiah’s amazing first album, Gun Shy, is criminally out of print. A CD in good condition goes for something like $250.00. I pop into Tower Records, buy that shit for $9.00 and you can all kiss my ass in the present.
For the next item, I’d have to risk going back to 1981, when I was all of eleven. Being this physical age with a 36ish mind might drive one insane. I’d pick up a first edition paperback of Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the book the film was based on. Actually, I think you can pick it up for around $50. So I could get it in this domain of space time. It’ll just set me back a finski.
|
