You Call Yourself A Writer?

Hitting your forties isn’t all bad.  We’re conditioned to hate aging, but there are benefits gained along the way.  You stop giving a shit about two-thirds of everything, which is nice.  What’s left, if you’re sane, are the things you have some control over and a great deal of perspective.

It’s the perspective that keeps bringing back to blogging.  I use it to sort it all out.  For instance, even though I believed I began taking writing seriously about five or ten years ago, the truth is I’ve had the instincts and actions of a writer since I was a tiny little dude with a cowlick.  No one was paying any attention, and I certainly had no guidance of any kind, so it all went unnoticed.  I was raw and I didn’t recognize my love of writing, even though it was all there in front of me. 

It’s difficult to find a starting point, so I’ll just pick fifth grade. My friend Eric already was a reader and comic book collector.  He drew his own stick figure comics and I quickly joined in.  I loved to be funny, so mine were goofier as opposed to Eric’s adventure-style comics. I also remember recording cassette tapes of comedy bits and sketches that were ridiculous.  Maybe the goal was to get them on the radio?  I don’t know. I enjoyed my creative writing assignments at school, and I borrowed the occasional book from the library, but I wasn’t a big reader. We also were pretty broke, so I didn’t get into comics, either.

I fell in love with the 1980’s comedy boom and I started my own comedy notebook when I was around sixteen or so. It was all hacky shit, but I was consistent, and I dreamed of doing stand-up.  I expanded my creative writing journal into a daily journal with comedy writing, poetry, and lists of insane shit.   The reason I didn’t set off into the world of comedy is a large book in itself, but mixed in there were a few open mics and writing for a sketch comedy show for a little while.  Now, what I didn’t notice at the time was that I got a bigger charge coming up with ideas for jokes and sketches than I did performing.  So much so, that even though I intellectually knew that a comedy career was never going to happen, I still wrote material.  I still journaled.  I still scratched down ideas. 

I also learned three chords on a guitar and started a band with my friend Sam.  We played for ourselves and we knew we sucked.  It was for fun and to spend some time together as we dealt with fatherhood, work, and bills, plus I got to write lyrics. Lyrics to me were free verse poems that could be anything.  I may have learned two more chords, but I wrote a shitload of poetry. 

I was in college at the time taking writing classes and I began to learn that a lot of my stuff didn’t suck.  Some of it had promise.  I purposely took extra English and writing classes with six-thousand-word requirements to get more practice.  (Was I a writing major? No.  A history major.  Remember, understanding myself didn’t come to my late thirties.)  My poetry got a little better, but I switched to short stories.  I had great professors, and even a few of my upper-level history professors commented on my papers.  I was good.  I could organize on my feet and I knew how to communicate.

I was ready to…become a substitute teacher.

You can guess how that ended.  Pretty soon I had a weird job working from home that paid the bills and kept me around for when the kids got home from school.  It was right around then I started to understand the disaster I had wrought.  I didn’t want to perform.  I didn’t want to sing.  I didn’t want to teach.  I wanted attention, for damn sure, but the thing that kept me going was the writing.  I didn’t want to be a movie star, but I would write a movie. Better yet, I would like to write the book that was made into a movie.

Around 2003 or so, right before we uprooted our lived and moved to Oregon, I took a crack at writing my first book.  I set it in the hotel I worked at while I was in college and it was about a guy in my situation dealing with life’s bullshit.  It wasn’t good. But, it was 76,000 words and I put it together. I tried a movie script, too.  I found a copy of the Clerks script online to estimate length and the structure of a script. Scripts are pretty fucking boring to write. Finished it.  Put it in a drawer.

We moved out here in 2005 and I started writing a book by hand while I had a desk job.  We had nothing to do and I wasn’t allowed to use the computer to write anything, so I bought a pack of yellow legal pads and wrote by hand during the day and transcribed it onto my computer at night.  It also wasn’t good, but I tried switching back and forth between timelines, which is something I like in fiction.

When we moved into our new house, I looked through the box where I keep all my old writing shit.  Tattered journals and school notebooks with half-conceived premises and characters.  Binders with song lyrics and shitty poems and more story ideas I forgot about years ago.  The box weighs a ton. There is so much of me and my time in there.  Ninety percent of it has not been seen by anyone.  It took me so long to see that I’ve been trying to write and get it out there the whole time. The proof was sitting there for years. I had to go to therapy to see my own development as a writer.  I had to go to therapy to have the nerve to call myself a writer.

I’ve had about ten abandoned projects since then, and four completed books.  I write now because it’s who I am and who I was designed to be.  I’ve made about nineteen dollars as a writer.  Do I want to make more?  Hell yeah.  Do I want to do it for a living?  Absolutely.  Whether or not that ever happens is mostly out of my hands. All I can control is the work and the enjoyment I get from it.  Anonymity gives me the freedom to experiment and do whatever the hell I want.  There aren’t any expectations. 

It’s just me and my ideas. 

Just a writer.

Tell Me Of This Thing You Humans Call 'Fun'.

Daytona Beach is not logical.

Here’s a little tip about writing blog posts. Aside from the entire endeavor remaining an enormous waste of time that has no real benefits other than a little bit of writing practice, it helps to have an interesting take when you create one. Once you have your take, you have to judge whether or not the three or four people that might read it would care. Everyone has their own tastes, but no one really cares when the viewpoint is from that of a whiny little bitch. Struggles with mental illness, shyness, social anxiety…those are all worth detailing as long as it comes from a place of truth and not merely complaining. 

I’ve been trying to attack this subject for years and I have never been able to successfully crack it.  Every time I give it a go, it sounds whiny. Now, I think I’ve found my angle.  I’m not judging it; I’m simply admitting I am confused by the entire concept of fun.

Yes, fun.  That fun.  The fun we all crave in our lives and most of us have far too little of.  The thing kids can do at almost any time, but adults have to take steps to carve out time for.

I’ve been attempting to solve this riddle for about ten years now.  When my sons hit high school, I realized that daily parenting had loosened up a bit, and in a few short years, my kids were able to take care of their own business.  That left my wife and me with this thing called time to ourselves.  We still worked a lot and the kids weren’t all the way gone, but the time popped up every week.  It was now time to think about fun.

I can only speak for myself.  I suck at fun. I don’t know what I lacked as a child, but I wasn’t fun at all.  I went along with fun sometimes, but mostly I liked conversation and that’s about it.  I liked my free trips to Disney in Orlando, and I liked going to the park with my kids.  There.  There you go.  No parties or blowouts or raves.  No lost weekends or spring break bashes.  No trips round the world.  No fucked-up Friday nights and Saturday hangovers.  No skiing, boating, mountain climbing, hang-gliding, bungee jumping, softball, volleyball, or roller derby.

This is not me complaining.  This is me being truthful.  I sincerely didn’t give a shit at all.  I never felt the ‘fear of missing out’ that much, either. 

Here’s an example.  My mother secured a beach condo for a few days in the summer at New Smyrna Beach in Florida. She invited Amy, me and the kids, and my brother and his girlfriend for a few days of sun, surf, sand, and a big pool.  All I could remember is wanting to go back inside after an hour or so of bullshit beach stuff.  I wanted the air conditioning, shade, and a cool drink.  We talked about those trips recently and I said to my mother “Why can’t it just be that?  Why bother with all the hot sun and sand in your crotch?  Why not just hang out in the AC and chill?”

I imagine the same scenario with skiing here in Oregon.  I’d rather just curl up by the fire and read or something.  Maybe listen to music and watch the snow fall. 

I figured out why Amy and I don’t have fun. It’s a combination of time and money.  We’re still chasing after weekends off for both of us and having money at the same time is a rarity.  Now, those are actual reasons.  But truthfully, with those variables going our way, we still wouldn’t know what to do. We managed a trip last year to the San Francisco area and we basically slept in our Airbnb room and just went out to eat.  No Alcatraz, no Golden Gate Bridge.  We are so unaccustomed to fun that we don’t know what to do with it if fell in our laps. We also didn’t really care.  We had time together and caught up on sleep. Fun?  Didn’t really even think about it.

There is a pressure to have fun.  It’s in the culture, it’s in advertising, it’s all over social media.  I feel it and I do take it pretty hard.  I’m no spring chicken and I don’t have a lot of fun stories to share.  I also realize I’m taking cues from others on how to live my life and that always means trouble.  So, even at this age, I still don’t know what to do.

When I’m in my element, I seem fun and I have fun. I’m funny, I can relay a story and I like listening to others do the same.  That’s about it.  Most other fun makes me uncomfortable.  Mindless partying seems like it’s under the purview of the stupid. Sorry.  The run-of-the-mill having a drink with friends is nice, but I don’t drink and that’s a stickler for a lot of these situations.  If I wanted to go out and feel self-conscious about my choices in life…I wouldn’t.  I’d just stay the fuck home.  That leaves activities, which do pique my interest. A little more money and time and I think I can convince Amy to do a little hiking and camping, or a least a little glamping.

My confusion begins and ends in my brain.  This is something that I should have figured out thirty years ago, but it still feels foreign.  A combination of social anxiety, shyness, lack of experience…take your pick.  Once you hit your forties you should understand who you really are and what you really aren’t.  And I guess…I do not have a natural inclination to be fun.

And I’m not sure that I care.

Here’s How You Make Another Lost

Sniff. I miss it.

Ever since Lost became a hit on broadcast TV fifteen years ago, they’ve been trying to recreate the magic that kept people coming back.  They fail over and over again for a bunch of reasons, but it doesn’t keep them from trying.  I think I’ve developed a list of things that need to happen if you even want to have a shot at making something even close.

It was and remains my favorite show of all time. I loved it, I miss it, I’ll defend its flaws and praise its triumphs.  I’ve also watched enough episodic TV in my life to discern the important differences between Lost and any other show.

The first ingredient would be to have a collection of writers with a common love for science fiction and character-driven stories.  Remember when Lost came out.  It straddled the end of traditional TV and the beginning of what we have now.  The series was bisected by a writer’s strike and is split into two halves.  Seasons 1 – 3 and Seasons 4-6.  The first three seasons existed when a drama needed around 22 episodes to fill a season.  Lost had a hugely successful premiere on ABC, it got the buzz and everything it needed to be a show that stayed on the air.  But the story barely left the ground.  They opened up a bunch of mysteries, but the majority of the show was flashbacks to the characters’ lives before the island.  It set up the skeleton of the show an allowed us to know who all the major players were.  If we didn’t have the answers yet, we had the characters.

Season 2 was the addition of a few new characters and their interaction with our original bunch.  Still, we had time to see the dynamics and we got plenty of mysteries along the way.  By Season 3, they started up the same old machine again and fans were ready for something else.  They show had us, but now what?  The flashbacks were stale, and they seemed to be reaching for tidbits that would keep us interested.  But that time had passed.  The show had to change.  Then, it did.

The reason why all of this happened was that the show was left alone to find itself. Not just ratings, but what the show was going to be.  TV isn’t like a book or a movie.  For those, you need everything planned out before you roll camera or show anyone your finished story.  A show can go on for years.  It can change as it goes along, and Lost did just that.

Cast members get fired.  Characters get killed off.  Writer’s strike.

Do shows have the freedom to flounder a bit anymore?  I assume that some do because the threshold of success is so much lower, but they can’t possibly have that much time to figure it all out.  If you want a Lost, you gotta leave them alone for a while.

I’ve watched a good portion of the Lost wanna-be’s in the last decade or so and I can also say to any who try to emulate, make sure that the mystery isn’t dumb. So many of these premises are so uninteresting or one-note that you can’t possibly believe that you’ll get six seasons out of it.  You can’t have all the electricity disappear or a mystery plane and leave it at that.  You can’t have the mystery be “What caused this?”  Eventually, you’ll have to spill the beans, then what?  You need to establish a world where mysteries are normal and they keep happening.  The characters solve one riddle but two more pop up along the way.  One central conceit isn’t enough.  Remember, the Lost island was more than an island.

Oh my God, don’t be so damn serious.  A story with a big cast should have all kinds of people, not just stoic leaders and stoic troublemakers.  You need levity and development that is just…light.  Fun.  You can learn a lot from people at play and so many sci-fi characters are so serious and boring.  You need a Hurley.  It helps to have a dog, too.

Here is the big one.  The absolutely necessary ingredient that separates Lost from a moderately memorable sci-fi hit.  You can only put out one show a week. In between each week, you have time to digest and episode and wonder what would come next. No bingeing at all. Bingeing makes it a different show.  Some shows benefit, some don’t. I watched the series as it aired, and I would share theories between seasons of what happened and what was to come.  It’s also important to point out the relationship Lost had with its fans.  There was so much content between seasons for fans to eat up and keep the hungry for the upcoming premiere. Mini-sodes, scavenger hunts, fake documentaries, podcasts…all this was brand new stuff when this show was running.  The creators heard fans and reacted.  No one will know how much it affected the story, but I bet there were a few decisions made based on the fans’ opinions.

It’s easier said than done, of course.  Frankly, I think it’s foolish to try to make something like Lost.  So much of it was timing and TV was so shitty at the time.  I don’t know if those budgets exist anymore either.  Mr. Robot is a sort of Lost-type show.  The Good Place is a sitcom version.  Blindspot, The Blacklist, Scandal…those were all knock-off carbon copy Lost’s with different flavors.  The influence should be to create something cool and weird and unique and compelling that takes chances.  Take those swings to see what works and maybe you’ll set up your own island.  I’d watch.

Get Over Getting Over It

An unrelated photo of sea lions.

I will always be a supporter of anyone who needs to work through mental illness.  It doesn’t matter if you’re born with a bad balance of chemicals, or something happened to you that shocked your brain and threw your life off course. The best thing we can do, with every passing year, is to normalize mental illness, depression, therapy, and recovery.  Our culture has suffered enough from ignoring it.

That’s why I’m exceptionally irate when someone suggests that people ‘get over it’.  I’m not sure if there’s anything more offensive to someone who’s struggling.  And who’s struggling, you ask?  Well, almost the entirety of the human race, that’s who.  You see, ‘get over it’ isn’t a call for strength or perseverance. It’s one of those dog-whistle things spoken by those who lack empathy, or those who still believe all people are born on some even playing field.  Or, to continue the metaphor, they see life as a game and conquering illness or trauma is as simple as brushing dirt off your knees and getting back in the game. 

They don’t really believe that, do they?  As a society, do we? We have 22 or so veterans committing suicide every day…do you think if someone went over to their homes and told them to ‘get over it’ that it would help?  When you see a friend after they’ve lost a parent or a spouse, you don’t say ‘get over it’.  Every time September 11^th comes around, you aren’t inundated with images of the twin towers with ‘Get Over It’ scrawled across the bottom.  Why?  Because somewhere inside we realize that something is broken or wrong or sad or scary and we don’t know how to cope. ‘Get over it’ does nothing. 

When those who want us to get over it say ‘get over it’, they are continuing a story they’ve created in their heads.  They believe that they climbed out of the muck without ever looking back and somehow, they triumphed by sheer will.  Well, we all know this is bullshit.  People need help.  Friends. Family. Medicine. Education.  Even if they figured out a way to muscle through their pain and succeed, I’m sure they have work to do on themselves, and they probably aren’t as awesome as they seem on the outside. (The secret truth of Facebook!)

No one gets over it.  You work through it.  You deal with it by feeling it and understanding it and recognize what it’s doing to you.  You carry it with you for the rest of your life.  It doesn’t disappear.  You work your back muscles until you can shoulder the burden and still live your life. 

Frankly, I’m growing tired of these chickenshits.  That’s right.  I believe they are the whiners and complainers.  They are the cowards.  The ones who tell others to suck it up or walk it off.  The ones who think pulling yourself up is actually a thing. I am so sick of these tiny little emotional children telling everyone how to behave because they don’t like the way problems make them feel.  They are scared of compassion and love.  They are afraid to look inside and care.   Either that or they are sociopaths and we shouldn’t be acknowledging them anyway.  It takes guts to face your demons and break cycles. If you don’t think you could use some change and some growth…well, you’re friggin’ wrong.

I will concede one thing.  Although I believe that mental illness is a process that you need to acknowledge, those who recognize their issue but still refuse to do anything about it…well, you’re not making it any easier for the rest of us.  Understanding that there is a path for you to take is not the same as walking it.  You have to do the work or shut the hell up.

Fade in. A lunch table.

Typical lunch item in 1989.

Do you have a moment in your life when you realized who you really were?  Your entire DNA makeup, your purpose, your fate, your destiny?  The thing you were doing was you, without pretense or doubt?  You were where you wanted to be and doing want you wanted to do?  I do.  The strange thing was, I had two.  The first one I misjudged.  The second, I got it right.

They both happened in 1989.

The first one, the false flag, happened on a day of fun.  I was with my high school girlfriend at Wet n’ Wild, the only Orlando area water park at the time.  We were enjoying a day of chlorinated water slides and searing hot concrete.  We did all the regular stuff, and then she wanted to go on the Kamikaze, the big slide of the park. Riders would kick back and gain speed as the approached the bottom and when they hit the pool, they skipped like stones.  I like speed, but I was afraid of heights.  Still am.  But I wanted to show some backbone.  We waited in line until we reached the top, and I could feel the gentle breeze of the day swaying the structure back and forth.  I was already feeling anxiety.

The park employee at the top actually had to tell everyone that they are to remain in a sitting position on the way down, but nobody does it.  The only way to get moving was to lean back and haul ass.  My girlfriend went first.  She sat, she was pushed off, and she leaned back.  She soared to the bottom and skipped into the pool.  My turn came and I was already breathing heavily from

the view.  I sat as instructed, but instead of leaning back, I sat up.  The entire way down.  I plopped like a turd in the pool in front of my girlfriend.             

 I thought that was me.  Nervous, anxious, shy, cowardly, lame, weak, and about as un-manly as one could get.  For years, I thought I was doomed to a life of loserdom.  Coming in last, being afraid, being overlooked, being invisible.  Those thoughts informed so many decisions.  That slide down the Kamikaze was just an example of my limp dick approach to life and there was nothing I could do about it. 

That’s what I used to think.  Actually, my moment of definition came a lot earlier. 

I was listening to a podcast with Bill Hader a few months ago, and he was asked what he thinks about when it’s time to be funny or write funny stuff.  He explained that he’ll never be as funny as he was at his high school lunch table, and everything he does is an attempt to get those guys to laugh.  I can safely say, that goes for me as well.

Most of high school was an absolute shitshow of disappointment and missed opportunities for me.  But at our lunch table, I felt at home.  I just started writing every day for a creative writing class and I began to write extra just for me.  And the table.  I shared what I had with my friends and tried to get them to laugh.  We unloaded all the SNL quotes for the previous weekend and cycled through thousands of jokes from a million sources.  I didn’t know about any other tables that were like this in high school, but I also didn’t look.  I didn’t care.  I actually got to be me, be funny, be creative. The rest of the school didn’t exist outside of that table.  That girlfriend I got?  One hundred percent got her attention because of that table.  I was funny and charming and at the very least interesting at that table.  Outside of it…I felt like the size of a walnut and just as cool and attractive.

It was because of that I wanted to try comedy and write all the time.  I wanted to sort out my thoughts and use writing as entertainment and therapy.  I gathered tiny pebble after tiny pebble to eventually create a decent-sized pile of confidence.  It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get moving.  I know how to read an audience, disseminate information, and use timing to illustrate a point because of that table. 

I write this because we are all obsessed with stories.  We want our lives to have a narrative that makes sense, even though that is nearly impossible.  But we have to understand ourselves, and the structure of a story is one way that we explain the events of our lives to others.  We should just take extra care to understand what the actual pivotal moments are that shaped us, and not ones influence by pop culture, depression, or someone else’s story. My life didn’t begin with the failure at the water slide, it began with my victories at the lunch table.

That’s my story.

Focus and the Bloody Shirt

Have you ever watched the John Wick movies?  Have you ever seen any action /adventure films…maybe some thrillers?  I re-watched Drive with Ryan Gosling the other night and there was a scene that flipped a little switch in my brain.  All of these movies are my guilty pleasures for one reason or another, but there is a common scene that pops up and it’s always bumped me.  Not in a bad way; it’s just something I’ve noticed.

After a big action sequence, or an extended, well-choreographed shoot-em-up, the protagonist leaves and travels to another area to keep the move going.  In the case of John Wick, his car was trashed, and he left on foot for the city.  The next scene sees him exiting a bus in downtown New York.  It wouldn’t be remarkable in the least except that his shirt is covered in blood.  Some of his, some of the enemy’s, but there is no doubt that he is visibly…fucked up. In Drive, Gosling’s character walks through a crowded area after he escapes with his life.  His signature jacket is smeared with blood from the assailants he just left behind.

Now, I realize these scenes are put there to show continuity and that our heroes have suffered.  I got it.  Since movies are there for us to interpret whatever we want anyway, my mind went a little further.  Normally, if one of us splattered blood all over us, we’d change our clothes (or throw them away). I’m pretty sure even the most casual of us would do it before we strolled down the sidewalk or got on a bus.  Not these guys.  Why?  It’s not just because they are tough and don’t give a damn what you think.  Nah, that’s too easy.  We know that.  I like to think that what others think, believe, what they may say, what they tell a cop, what they may take a picture of, doesn’t even cross their minds.

The outside world and its opinions and rules and history and biases and interference do not register to our heroes.  For the extent of the narrative in front of us, they are singularly focused on survival or several days of high-octane ass-kicking revenge.

Sociologists research contentment and happiness and they’ve concluded that what human beings crave above all is focus. Not money or things.  Not love or friendship.  Not Oreos or the beach. They want those precious few moments in life where you lose yourself fully in the task at hand.  It’s when we can fully take a breath and cut out every other thing that makes noise in our lives.  Only through focus can we step back into the din and appreciate love, friendship, things and Oreos. You can get it through meditation and fitness, maybe some solitude or reflection.  Most of us need to be doing something.  I think that’s why my wife likes being a chef.  It is an all-consuming job while she’s there.  When she’s home, she’s home.

Movies give us stories about those rare times when there is a purpose-driven focus.  A hero on a mission.  A ticking clock where everything in the world is sidelined until the job is finished. That’s focus.  It’s sporadic in our lives.  But like sleep and exercise, our body needs it.  I’m starting to think that’s why we like movies in the first place.  At least the exciting ones.  So many stories are about abandoning your daily bullshit because of a life and death scenario.  It’s not just a thrill, it’s focus.  What’s happening right now, at this moment, is all that matters.  We’d all like to live life in that manner all the time but it’s impossible. 

It’s why we do all the fun stuff in our lives.  It’s why we play games, or knit, or build stuff in the garage.  It’s why I’m writing this right now.

I Love Time Travel - Part 25 - Avengers: Endgame

America's asses.

You like nerdy superhero movies and the mother of all of them comes out.  The whole world is ready, it turns out to be a great time, and it includes time travel.  I like Avengers: Endgame a lot, I like a lot of the choices and the endnotes for a lot of the characters.  But the time travel stuff…I’m not so sure about.

(Argh!  Thar be spoilers ahead!)

I don’t need to break down the plot.  That’s not the problem.  I don’t even disagree with the choice to use time travel. They already introduced a magic glove that can rearrange the universe, so what’s wrong with a little time travel?  My problem lies in the discussion of time travel and their attempts to make it happen. 

Scott Lang is our audience surrogate/dummy and assumes time travel works like it does in the movies (of which Endgame is one.)  Banner and Nebula explain, as if Scott never paid attention in Physics class, that time travel doesn’t work like that at all.  They say that…well…in a dumb way, that traveling through time has NO CONSEQUENCES for you whatsoever.  You can go shoot yourself in the past (as Nebula does) and nothing will happen to you.  You can save JFK, give yourself lottery numbers, or kill baby Hitler and not a damn thing will happen to you.

Ick.

First of all, how the hell do they know?  I understand that Banner’s all green and smart, but so far, no one has ever successfully accomplished time travel it without a magic ring. I always assumed that we won’t ever know for sure the nature of time until we figure out time travel.  It’s all theory by people way smarter than you and I. The problem in the fictional world is that you’ve set up a method of time travel that is shitty to the entire universe outside of the travelers themselves.  If I need an Infinity Stone, I’ll just go steal one, no matter what happens to the world I take it from. In a nerdier sense, that means no Scarlet Witch, Vision, Captain Marvel, the Guardians don’t get together, the Avengers themselves don’t get together.  If I’m Thor, and my hammer has been destroyed, why not go back and steal it from my younger self?  Now younger Thor doesn’t have jack shit!

It’s not until bald Tilda Swinton explains to Banner that they can’t just steal the stones and take off to another time that we right the wrong of our heroes’ original plan.  The stones are integral to the development of all of these characters and their lives, so after they are borrowed, they have to be returned to the time and place they came from. So, what we understand now is, that it is important to preserve the timelines and not just pickpocket important shit from them and split. Got it.  I just don’t follow the logic that your timeline can be screwed around with, but the other timelines have to remain intact? 

(Remember, I’m only interested in fictional and/or cinematic time travel.  It doesn’t exist in reality (yet?) so we have to play it out in make-believe.)

The 2 major camps of time travel are the loops and the strings.  Loops go back and can’t change shit, and strings can change whatever at a high cost. Each camp has a glaring flaw.  Loops eliminate free will and strings can’t account for the replacement of the second self.  (Marty McFly comes back, everything’s different, including him.  Where’d the other Marty go?)

Endgame time travel is a different breed altogether. Are they really positing a passive time travel?  Breaching the limits of time and space with no repercussions at all? It served this story because it needed to set up the ‘time heist’ to retrieve Infinity stones and not to alter the past.  But a transgression against the nature of time that in no way can endanger your own timeline is tough to swallow.  I mean, in reality, it could very well be how shit works.  I don’t know. (Jim – History major, shitty at math.)  As far as its current realm, the one of science fiction, it kinda sucks.

Here’s what I think happened.  And this is my writer brain kicking in.  The obvious choice is to go back and get the stones through Scott’s idea and Tony’s super-science.  You go back, have some hilarity, have Cap fight himself, meet a younger Thanos.  Action, adventure, and 2.5 billion dollars.  But the writers knew that this was RDJ’s last hurrah as Iron Man and a total reset was out of the cards.  Tony needed an exit and the snap had to hurt. With this version, his daughter’s life is preserved, he goes out a hero, and cashes his Marvel checks for the rest of his life. That’s how we got the movie we got. Because the final plan hinged on the fact that Morgan Stark had to remain in existence, everything that we saw in Part 1 had to stay put.  I honestly believe with so many characters, a time stone, Pim particles, and a hundred other variables, they couldn’t fuck around with time travel consequences.  It was just too much.  That would have made it a 4-hour movie!

But hell, I still loved it.  I would like to point out that Endgame is the highest-grossing movie of all time; which that means that the number one slot is currently held by a time travel movie. (Drops mic in nerdy fashion.)