Brookes lent me the movie Primer. If you’ve never seen it, which I’m sure you haven’t, it’s an 87 minute flick created on a $7,000 budget that uses time travel as its main theme. As always, other people have wrote much more profound thoughts on this subject than I can, most notably Chuck Klosterman in section 3 of the PDF. Even still, without going into details of the movie, the ability to travel in time is by far the most complex thought process to wrap your mind about and this hold true after watching Primer.

As Primer demonstrates, once you have a machine that can go back in time, you can keep going further back in time. This starts to spiral out of control because you keep going back in time and your copies are still…???? I hold no belief that time travel is possible but as I’ve learned from thousands of years of history, nothing is impossible. People think nuclear war would end humanity, I’d put my money on time traveling.

In the Klosterman PDF (an excerpt from Eating the Dinosaur) he poses the question what would you tell your past self if you only had 15 seconds on the phone with him or her. Read the passage if you want to know more about the context of this question but I’ll answer it after giving it some thought. My unrealistic, idealistic present self would tell my past self never to touch a drop of alcohol. However, if I know me, my past self would start laughing and say “some nerd just told me never to drink alcohol.” With more thought on the actuality of the situation, knowing past self would only hear a voice claiming to be me (which I’d have to waste precious time saying), I’d tell myself to not play so many video games. Learn a language, play outdoors, go on dates, do SOMETHING. I didn’t learn this until 24. If I could combine the two tidbits, I think I would be where I’m at now at 27 instead of 31.