I was thinking about our smartphones. I think about them too much. I like to blame things on the phone’s magical powers of distraction. I wondered what I would have to blame before the iPhone. Pocket watches became an everyday accessory in the mid 1800s. Imagine the kind of hell that brought on people who only had to be reminded of passing time by a distant church bell. With a tiny gadget chained to their coat came a constant compulsion to interrupt their thoughts by picking up the device and checking the time.
Maybe that’s why I found myself asking my ninety-two-year-old grandma about fate over lunch. My grandma is the nicest person I’ve ever met. She thinks I am the fucking shit, and the feeling is mutual. We went to lunch, and I asked her if she thought life was predetermined. She thought about how every ten years, it was like we were entirely different people. She determined she didn’t think so because of drug addicts and how their recovery is not guaranteed.
Her answer made me wonder if maybe only the tentpole moments are predetermined. Maybe the biggest events in our lives are fixed, but the roads between them aren’t. Getting from A to B still depends on a thousand ordinary choices, and sometimes that's where the shit goes off the rails.
I relished the thought that life was already all planned out. I was about to kick up my feet, while doing all the things that make me happy, and enjoy the ride. But if the transition between those different people is where everything can go down the proverbial dumper, it’s hard to kick my feet up for too long.
I read four Kurt Vonnegut novels in June. My favorite one was Sirens of Titan. The book planted the seed about our predetermined lives. I wanted to know more about Vonnegut and understand the fascination he has with time. His “personal life” section of Wikipedia wasn’t giving me what I was looking for, so I watched a documentary on him made by one of his close friends.
It’s a biography, recounting his life, but a story from the beginning holds all the information I was looking for. Vonnegut told the filmmaker about a time when he was young and walking in the forest. He put his face up to a tree and had a vision. He saw all the destruction and death he would see again, exactly, a few years later, when he was a prisoner of war in Dresden during World War II. He saw what would be, and I think this story explains the themes behind his lifetime of work. The future exists and is hidden from us, but there could be a glimpse given at an unexpected moment. How could that not have been a lifelong source of bewilderment?
Whatever iteration of my life I’m in, there’s no guarantee I’ll make it to the next one, but I know there’s some weird shit going on. Like Vonnegut, one or two things have happened to me that have become epicenters of thought in my brain. Everything goes back to it; everything is born from it. A black hole in my mind.
When we went to my Grandma’s house to pick her up, she walked us around to show her Fourth of July decorations. My Grandma was happy to tell me she is going to the movies on Tuesday to watch Jaws. It’s her first time watching it, and I sang the “Du-nuh, Du-nuh, Dun-nuh” song and told her she’ll love it. She mentioned the only problem is finding out the movie times. I told her I could put the app on her phone, and she said no, she doesn’t want to do that, she’ll just call the theater.
After we sat down at the restaurant, we decided on our order. My Grandma handed me her delicate wristwatch and asked me to fix the time. It needed to be set an hour later. Next time I see her, she’ll probably ask me to set it back an hour.
