God who'd want to be such an asshole?

There was a time. You follow? Regardless, there usually is a time. Sometimes, and I nearly missed the irony in using that word, that time can’t be a was. Sometimes it is a will be. Sometimes it’s an is.

Take, for example, because I guess it is what I purport to know, and you should at least write what you know if you can’t think of anything more clever, me. There was a time. There was a time I was full of potential. Really then, what I guess I’m saying is that there was a time when there would be a time. See how the conditional slipped in there? There was a time when I thought there will be a time. A time to, excuse the rhyme, shine. To move mountains, I guess, if that’s what I decided to do with that time.

I’m not a creative guy. There was a time, I guess. I used to invent whole stories from whatever cloth stories are made of. What I mean though, more specifically, is that I’m not creative in the sense that an atheist thinks God isn't creative. It's not that the duck-billed platypus isn't quite a curious fellow, it's that some deity didn't fucking create it. I occasionally produce things or fabricate things, but only rarely and only after the tepid and halting attempts that pass for great effort on my part.

Up until last month I was convinced there would be a time. There would be a time when I would be creative – as well as productive and so on. There’s a big difference in verb tense there. Last month I (would) have said there will be a time when I will be creative. Such certainty! There was a time. There was a time I was filled with certainty.

I feel old. I’m barely making headway into my twenties and I feel old.

There was a time that I thought I’d never live to see twenty. I was certain of it. For no real reason, I had convinced myself that I would probably not live to see my twentieth birthday. Maybe I’d get hit by a bus, maybe shot on accident, maybe die heroically and tragically rescuing a loved one from a fire. I didn’t tell anyone until recently. I knew it would seem morbid to some. I never thought of it as morbid. I saw it as motivation.

Perhaps my deepest regret is that, regardless of how convinced I was that I’d die before twenty, I still did nothing great before then. Perhaps there will be a day that I regret reaching forty in the same way. After my twentieth birthday I arbitrarily moved the date I’d never see to forty, understand?

The date was always arbitrary, and that I knew from the moment I picked it. Maybe it was some learned Obsessive Compulsive behavior that made me pick such a perfect age – exactly two decades old. Perhaps it was a similar behavior that made me pick the exact double of that age for the next date. There is a time, and I guess it is better to just say now, now I am less convinced. I mean, I made it to twenty. Teenagers are the ones who die tragically because they think they’re invincible, according to bloodless fucking magazines. Or maybe we are all convinced we’re going to die and that’s why we act with such apparent unconcern for our lives.

In Nicaragua I used to have fantasies about dying. Yes, these were morbid. I would nearly get choked up about the fantasies I would invent from that selfsame story cloth. I should have seen then that my ability to create was quickly being extinguished. When your powers of invention become tragic tales of your own heroism, you’re doing it wrong. Like Wile E. Coyote using an Acme product or Elmer Fudd looking down the barrel of his own gun to see why it won’t fire, you are doing it wrong. There was a time when I was doing it wrong.

There was a time that I had this particularly vivid fantasy, while on a bus ride across the country, of the bus being pulled over by a band of thugs armed with Cold War era Soviet and US automatic rifles. Everyone was freaking out, but I knew I’d be dead before twenty anyway so I was relatively fearless. I was pretty concerned about my atrocious Spanish, so my palms were sweaty. This fantasy devolved into eighty or so thousand different fantasies. I’d convince them to leave us alone (“these aren’t the droids you’re looking for”). I’d punch the leader in the face and steal his gun, shooting most of them as bullets made Swiss cheese of my torso. Our academic director would be attempting to negotiate and they’d go to shoot her or one of my classmates and I’d heroically and tragically dive in front of the bullet. My mind spun out of control. You know the feeling, I’m sure.

Now (there is a time), however, I’m less convinced I’ll be dead by forty. Though, now that I say that, I’ll probably die tomorrow. I would be so fucking angry if that happened. I can’t die until I finish something. I need to complete one project. I need to leave some kind of mark on this world that says: Chris did this and the world is better for it. Fuck the rest.

Look, I know. I know that every single interaction I have with another person is of great import. I know I should be focusing on those more because I’m not very good at making the world a more bearable place one on one. But I can’t help but want to be indelible. I would simply prefer to be written about than to be known only to my friends and family.

Maybe it’s because I don’t have much of a connection with my past. I don’t remember much of it, I don’t think of it much, and much of it doesn’t haunt me. For good or ill. Can’t be sure which. I tend to be in the midst of things, you see. I think many people do. Some of the folk I’ve encountered in my life are of a different kind of stuff. They cannot but think of their past constantly. If I was such a person I may be able to focus on how I’ve improved (or not) the world through my interpersonal relationships.

Unfortunately though, I aspire to be a scholar. I want to be a good person, but I don’t feel like that’s a high enough goal to aim for. I feel like if you aren’t being a good person, again, you’re doing it wrong. To aspire to be a good person then is to aspire to be something you should be already. To aspire to be a scholar is to work for something. Something more than transient.

There was a time, earlier today, when I argued that life is messy because people are messy. There is a time, and that time is now, when I think that life would find a way to be messy without people, probably just for the fuck of it. I don’t know if there will be a time, at least for me. I might die tomorrow and never see my fortieth birthday.