As I write this, I am stuck in a silly trans-temporal existence where nothing makes sense. This is called my time travel universe. By me. There’s nothing else here. Other than me. Go figure. You may as well call me Samuel Becket for the cruel irony. Whichever Sam Becket you’re thinking of isn’t the right one either way. I mean the other one.

Some people have funny notions about time travel. Like, information is the only thing that can be passed on. Or that the only time travel is that that causes our own universe to be made, ie: a stable time loop – the justification of the Grandfather Paradox, which is very important to this story. Now, I find this to be a silly notion. What happened to me quite clearly throws most time travel ideas out the window.

When I was a child I had a father. Like everyone else. And like everyone else’s father, my father was not me. In fact, my father was a normal man from a normal job in a normal company, from a time he was expected to be for a man his age. So when I went back in time and replaced my father and became my own father, I defied quite a number of laws.

Let me briefly explain what didn’t make sense:

• The fact that when I time traveled I ended up on Earth, rather than in outer space, asphyxiating. All physical laws would suggest that as the Earth moves around the sun, and that the sun moves around the center of the galaxy, which probably moves about some unknown force, my appearance in the –same exact place as I was when I jumped through time- would have me, again, asphyxiating in space.
  
  I was totally okay with that.
  
• The fact that what I had changed, changed nothing other than the identity of my father. In fact, my father ceased to exist immediately upon our making contact. I have no idea what this law is called. If this had been an identical antimatter universe, as I first assumed upon my father’s obliteration, everything I touched would have been destroyed along with myself via the… you know, whole obliteration theory… about anti matter.
  
• The fact that when I had consummated a marriage with my mother (who neither looked nor acted like my mother at the time) the offspring produced was still me. This may be plausible to some. In fact, this is even possible, at least, theoretically, to produce an offspring genetically identical to me, albeit unlikely. The fact the child would grow up to be exactly me is practically impossible.
  
• This occurs to me now as I’m writing this that maybe the child isn’t the same and I simply am remembering him as the same as me because I am me. Wow. Talk about predestination paradox – but that too doesn’t make sense. I think as the Sam Becket you may or may not think I am (which is the one I may or may not have been thinking of) said one time, “God or Time, or whatever, is playing with me.”

• Clearly, I am in a Sam Becket play or novel with too many characters.
• That would make this whole thing make more sense.
• This is like a Franz Kafka work.
• Which also explains why it doesn’t make any sense.
• Someone, whoever reads this: please don’t write a research paper my writing.

It all began one morning on a Saturday afternoon, in October. As I rearranged my apartment, I picked up a stray pair of socks that was lying underneath a couch that I had set against the wall. Plain old socks I thought. Of course, plain old socks. The moment I threw them over my shoulder into a pile of junk accumulating in the middle of the room, my flat melted and I was somewhere else. Well, somewhen else, really. I was in the same apartment, twenty years prior, as I later found out. Luckily for me it was empty.

There is a little bit of a blur. Not the rest per se, but the unimportant stuff. It’s alright to skip it because it’s unimportant, I dare to think. I dare you to think! I dare you to no longer carelessly throw about socks! I certainly learned my lesson! God or Time Or Whatever, as Sam said does NOT want you throwing socks over your shoulder into piles of junk! Wow! What an absurdist lesson. Who does this to a man? Either way. Where was I before I began to ramble.

Well yes. I stumbled about for a couple of hours. Which, as it happened, turned into days. And weeks. You’d think that all the homeless are just lost time travelers who made the same mistake I did. It’s hard to find a job when all your college and experience is in the future, and all your documentation is in the future too. I mean, you shouldn’t exist in the past. Although I did. Well, so there was I, in a bumiform, unshaven, unkept, unwashed, unashamed at this point (for shame quite quickly quits its quantitiousness and you come to question whether or not it is a quaillusional human concept in the first place), begging for scraps, that I bumped into a young man on the street. Well, normally, all this did was make them apologize, drop some change into the cup and walk away fast. I suppose at the time I found it strange that the man shattered into a million pieces which immediately disappeared. I find that, ahem, Time or God or Whatever, again, has a tendency to be melodramatic about things it’ll just erase from existence either way. I don’t think anyone remembered that man other than me. I believe he was my father.

The homeless days went on for a couple of months until I decided to stopbeing such a bum and go and get some odd job off the books. This forwardness impressed many an employer, but the stench usually drove them back. Eventually some benefactress gave me the job so that I could stop smelling less like a decaying goat stuck in a pigpen which had been flooded with rotting eggs and elephant droppings. Exact quote. I don’t believe she was being as eloquent as she was trying.

Either way, my employment was carrying boxes, and mopping.I slept on a cot in the basement which was cleaner than filthy, but dirtier than clean. That says nothing, I understand, but it is the only way I can articulate it. I think the old lady had some illegal smuggling business involving prosthetics. Or body parts. It may have been both, actually. I didn’t care for the specifics, really, and I was getting used to living in the past. Looking back to my homeless days, I must have been that man who prophesied the end on the street corner, or the guy who complained that he wrote the original script for Schindler’s List and Spielberg stole it. Which wasn’t particularly true due to the fact that I only wrote down the basic plot of the story, however mine involved more aliens and pyramids and Agent Mulder dueled Hitler, with both using the Lance of Longinus and the Gungnir, but it was close. I still think it’s a great idea. I really think portraying Iztak Stern as a machete wielding Moses look alike from Mars may have been a little too dry, on the other hand. I went to college for this, you know.

When I was released from the benefactress’s service when her smuggling ring of prosthetics and organs or fingurines of Bruce Campbell was found out and raided by the Police, I was placed under witness protection program and given a much more comfortable job in a book store, where I met my mother silently perusing On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, when I let slip some of my better pick ups. She was charmed, I was charmed, we both were quite charmed, and also she was quite full, because I believe I spent my entire paycheck on dinner. One thing lead to another, and I ended up married in a hovel by a drunk judge on an island off the coast of Maine. Then I fathered me.

My child’s childhood was as difficult as my own. Except harder. Especially for me, because everything I did fried my brain until completely exhaustion and fainting. Every time I grounded me, my child, my brain, and my conscious would tell me,

“Why are you grounding him/you/me, you’re him/you/me, you should understand what he/you/I was/were/was trying to do and understand that he/you/I doesn’t/didn’t understand.”

A few brief points worth mention.

• Being a father of yourself is a lot harder than it seems.
• Being telepathic of yourself causes some serious issues with identity.
• Being married to your mother really makes you feel what Sophocles was trying to say. Or Freud, for that matter.
• They say your teenage years are confusing and hard, try having those with a mid life crisis to boot.
• Also try this:

• The 28 hour day, when you have a flexible work schedule
• Boycotting the 20 dollar bill because the man on it is as evil as Stalin.
• Researching time travel.
• Not assigning research papers that ask you to use original thought that has already been thought of by someone else, rendering the original thought unoriginal in the first place, and then penalizing original thought because you lack a citation for it, as no one has had that original thought prior to yourself.

Either way. Somehow, along the way, when I/my son hit my/his eighteenth birthday, I shattered and disappeared into nothing like I never existed, and my wife/mother and son/me completely forgot about me, a lot like the universe forgot about my father.

I’m not sure how this works. I can only assume it is the way the universe deals with temporal paradoxes is by creating more of them until the chain leads to its own amusing undoing. I believe the pair of socks was quite clearly under my couch by someone else’s doing, perhaps by Alien Vampire Hitler who was trying to destroy the universe. In which case he succeeded, and Agent Mulder failed, rendering the sacrifice of the Lone Gunmen meaningless.

]I am now in the final place of those who are rendered nonexistent. The time travel universe. My own. This reminds me a lot of the Butterfly Effect, except, retrospectively, it’s a lot more entertaining, though a bit more convoluted and senseless, but better on the pure principle that Ashton Kutcher was not involved. Or maybe he has been. Someone had put me on an episode of Trans Dimensional Punk’d.


Indeed, it seems that Samuel Beckett (in honor of the other one) was featured on our program, however we did offer our sincerest apologies and provided him with full compensation by giving him a $20 dollar coupon to Friendly’s. He has said himself that he harbors no ill will towards MTV, or Mr. Kutcher, and has admitted that he had a lot of fun.


Samuel Beckett (once again, wrong one) was actually quite displeased that he had to spend half of his life begging and working for scraps in a time he wasn’t meant for existing in. He also wished to point out the brain damage he suffered while receiving telepathic discharge from coexisting with his alternate universe past self, and his prolonged exposure to the Land of Notime. His presence in the Pandimensional Realm greatly upset him, as well, and he continued to ask to go home. He never returned home.