Author’s Note: This is a reworking of an article I posted in 2015 in an earlier version of Dunebat Country. I have rewritten it for the present year (2024 at the time of redaction) and have reposted it here as a meditative exercise.
As a child, I used to daydream about an older version of me — a grownup Adult Dunebat, ever-smiling, always patient, always calm, content with his place in life, and confident in himself — traveling backward in time to mentor the younger me.
Adult Dunebat would appear in a sparkling temporal haze, glowing like an angel as he exited the awe-inspiring, totally Hollywood-worthy time portal I imagined him using to travel to the past. He would have all the answers I ever sought, and he would reveal my life’s journey to me: where I would attend college, what I would study, who I would marry, what I would name my children, who and what I would become. He would chase the childhood bullies away and speak words of encouragement that would forever shape my destiny. I was a bastard child who grew up without a father, and I suppose I was trying to will the perfect father figure into existence.1
Childhood came and went, and to my great disappointment, Adult Dunebat never appeared.
That’s probably a tremendous blessing in disguise.
Thirty-two years have passed, and I have yet to become the idealized adult version of me that I once fantasized about meeting. Were I to meet my nine-year-old self2 today and relate my life’s story — such as it is — to him, it would likely depress him.
Hell, he’d probably start crying.
“You’re divorced?” he’d wail, tears streaming down his chubby cherub face. I had grown up in a broken, single-parent home, reared to adulthood by my mother and grandmother.3 Raising me wasn’t easy on them, and Lord knows I didn’t make it any easier on them at times. Both my mother and grandmother were God-fearing Christians, and both of them stressed the sanctity of marriage and the stability a solid nuclear family could provide for growing children. My mother had known only abusers and abandoners, and my grandmother’s husband was never the same after returning from the Pacific Theater. I suspect they were trying to mold me to become a better husband and father than the ones they had known.
“‘Fraid so,” I’d nod solemnly, the weight of the invisible scarlet “D” dangling from my neck threatening to permanently warp my upper spinal column. “Don’t ask about her,” I’d add in rapid afterthought as young Baby Bat bawled his poor little eyes out. Baby Bat had some terrible crushes at his age, and he desperately hoped to marry one certain crush…
Since I now know the kind of obsessive-compulsive thoughts he is just now struggling with, the knowledge that the current woman of his dreams would forever slip through his fingers would likely render him a catatonic mess.
“Do you, at least, have friends?” he’d bawl. “Are you popular? Do people love you?”
Poor little messed-up kid. Today, I can name the problems he’s just now beginning to face as though these problems were old friends I knew quite well: Bipolar II with possible schizoid ideation, extreme emotional sensitivity with zero control over his emotional outbursts, constant defensiveness, mild obsessive-compulsive disorder4, magical and intrusive thoughts, anger management problems… All these horrible things have already set him apart from others by country miles, and he doesn’t even know it yet. How would a haplessly confused nine-year-old put names to the ineffable internal torments he faces daily if the adults around him haven’t diagnosed the issues either?
The tendrils of generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, detachment from emotional issues, and intense self-loathing and deep-seated resentment toward society itself hadn’t snaked their way into my nine-year-old existence yet. That, and the all-consuming drive toward solitude and its accompanying soul-crushing loneliness, wouldn’t slink into my mind until high school.
Truth be told, by the time I’d reached my thirties, I’d had a string of silly, stupid crushes that went nowhere, one long-distance relationship that transformed into an unhealthy obsession, a failed marriage, and a couple of aborted rebounds. I had no real experience with long-term relationships and precious little sexual experience to build any competent knowledge base. While I had been blessed with quite a few lasting friendships, I’d also fallen out of touch with many of the friends little Baby Bat had back then… and I’d lost or driven away just as many friends as I’d gained over the years.
Even with the friends I had, my own mental and emotional problems tended to force me to turn inward instead of outward for support. I often sought the solace of solitude, and as lonely as solitude could be… nobody could hurt me there, and more importantly, I couldn’t hurt others out of pride, anger, or stupidity.
Baby Bat was a dying extrovert. Adult Dunebat is a staunch introvert.
I had no hope to offer little Baby Bat, so I’d nod silently and smile ruefully, praying he’d get to his next question even though I quietly dreaded what he might ask.
“D-did you…” he’d begin timidly after a few minutes of intense weeping, “did you ever get a job in TV?”
I’d wince inwardly at the question like I’d been bitten by a venomous snake. How do I tell my younger self about the failed forays into the local broadcast television scene? Is there a positive spin I can put on what, at the time, felt like eighteen wasted years? Getting fired from the local CBS affiliate due to a depressive spell, resigning in disgrace after an otherwise successful nine-year stint at a religious broadcaster I once adored, then leaving another six-year stint working with the local ABC/FOX affiliates because the money just wasn’t good enough isn’t what Baby Bat wants to hear about.
What do I tell him, then?
What would you tell him?
“Kid… you really wanna work in TV?”
I’d wait for him to nod “yes” out of courtesy, but I’d already know the answer. I was his age when I decided I wanted to work in television.
“Then get your fat ass outta Texas!” I’d almost scream at him, setting off a new round of tears with my all-too-adult potty mouth. “Or, at least, get out of Odessa! Hitchhike! Do manual labor! Be a drug mule! Whatever you have to do to get to Hollywood or Vancouver when you hit eighteen, for God’s sake, just do it! Just don’t stay in Texas!”
“Look at all your favorite actors from here,” I’d say, counting down the list of his favorite Texas actors, writers, and other celebrities that I knew all too well, all people he looked up to like the heroes of ancient times. “Dabney Coleman. Michael Dorn. Woody Harrelson, a Midland native! Steve Martin. Willie Nelson. Roy Orbison. Bill Paxton. Brent Spiner. Gene Freaking “Great Bird” Roddenberry, for God’s sake. Your heroes, kid! What do they all have in common? They left Texas! Every one of them! Nobody who’s anybody in the Hollywood TV scene made any kinda name for themselves by staying in Texas!”
That’s what I’d want to tell him, anyway… but I wouldn’t. I’m no Jacob Marley; I don’t want to scare the kid (though maybe I should… and I think I’ve probably already done so).5 Instead, I’d simply smile, ruffle his messy brown hair with my fingers, and tell him, “Can’t tell you, kid. I’d be violating the Temporal Prime Directive.”
Nine-year-old me was a Trekkie, too. Surely, he’d understand.
“What about Austin?” Baby Bat would ask, pouting, his lower lip quivering. I distinctly remember wanting to attend the University of Texas campus at the state’s capitol back then. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of my maternal uncle; he was the closest thing to a father figure I’d had then.
“Kid… you never make it out of Odessa,” I’d tell him gently, a sad smile frozen on my face.
“Do you… draw?” he’d ask. Professionally is what he’d mean; I wanted to go into comics then. “Do you write? Are you published yet?”
I’d silently shake my head “No”. Fresh tears would spill from his little brown eyes anew.
“Also,” I’d add sheepishly, “NASA retired the space shuttle back in ’11, so you’ll want to forget about that dream before you let it take root.” Baby Bat would be in hysterics by then. “Sorry, kid.”
Eventually, Baby Bat would compose himself enough to glare at me through the curtain of tears flowing down his little face and ask me one more question: “You’re still fat?”
“Kid,” I’d sigh, rubbing the bridge of my nose with my forefinger and thumb to stave off the migraine I’d suddenly develop, “weird as it would be, I will spank you for sassing your elder.”
Throughout this harrowing conversation, I would try to console Baby Bat as he lamented his lost future, but it probably wouldn’t help any. If your future self showed up tomorrow and told you that your every hope for the future was a wasted wish, would you react well?
You’d probably want to ask them, “What the Hell have you been doing with your life?”
I still ask myself that every day.
At least once a year every year for the past few years, I have promised myself I would start my life over completely. I would put the past behind me and live as a man born anew. In 2014 on my birthday, I actually wrote all my sins and regrets (the ones I could remember, anyway) on tiny slips of paper, stuffed them into a small wooden box, and then burned the box in the presence of friends. I felt little more than sorrow and breathlessness from smoke inhalation. A few years before that, I was re-baptized… but I arose from the waters of ritual immersion feeling exactly the same as I had felt going in.
Grandiose ceremonies and heartfelt oaths are vain and meaningless stage performances without discipline, something I have longed to possess but have never truly mastered. One must possess the will to dominate the self, to deny our bodies the empty pleasures of the moment for the supreme satisfaction achieved only through long-term, continual self-improvement.
Developing personal discipline and lasting structure after living an undisciplined, disorderly life for over forty years isn’t easy. It’s akin to learning how to walk again after a three-year coma has left your leg muscles atrophied. You can give in to the hopelessness and live without learning how to walk again, but do you really want to live the rest of your years in a wheelchair, especially when learning how to use a wheelchair instead of your legs is a unique problem on its own, as anyone who uses one will tell you? You will either accept your atrophied legs and settle for the chair, or you will force yourself to endure the agony of physical therapy — and the repeated frustrations of failure that come with that (and you will fail again and again) — so you can learn to walk again. It will hurt, and it will cost you valuable time… but that time and pain will prove worthwhile investments when you walk your daughter down the aisle on her wedding day ten years later.
I have fallen very far over the past several years. I mismanaged my money. I made poorly thought-out decisions. I allowed my art and my writing to fall by the wayside. I allowed someone else to take full control over my life until they had nearly run both our lives into the ground. I lost contact with a family member out of anger and an intense drive to get away from them. I fell down, again and again… then I got up, dusted myself off, figured out where I misstepped, then tried again, hoping to avoid stepping in whatever pitfall my foot had landed in last time.
Those missteps were only the most recent in a decades-long string of failures. Someday, I may tell you about them all.
Naturally, none of those failures left me with a very positive disposition. I’m a bitter, bleeding, shell-shocked, cowardly, misanthropic, antisocial wreck, a half-formed golem with identity crises and severe social anxiety who can’t trust his own decisions and has no idea how other human beings think or function.
I won’t stay this way, though. I choose not to stay this way.
I fell, hard, but I must get back up again.
I have to.
More than that… I want to change. I want to write again, to write for a living! I want to write for Hollywood,6 for the entertainment industry. I want to teach… someday. I want to finish my damn Bachelor’s degree, and then I might want to get a Master’s. I want to get the Hell out of Odessa and live somewhere — anywhere — else, if only for a short while.
I want to excel, and I won’t be satisfied with myself or feel content with myself until I do… because someday, some cosmic accident or technological twist of fate may hurl me back several years into the past, where I may come face-to-face with a sad-eyed nine-year-old version of me desperately searching my eyes for some sign of hope for a better tomorrow, and I don’t want to make that little boy cry.
- How very narcissistic of me.[↩]
- I started having these time travel fantasies soon after seeing Back To the Future IIIÂ on television the year after it was released in theaters.[↩]
- My older sister was living elsewhere by then, if memory serves correctly.[↩]
- …Or is it obsessive-compulsive personality disorder? I can never remember.[↩]
- Maybe I should scare him into choosing an entirely different path for his life.[↩]
- Well, I’ll write for Hollywood, provided Hollywood hasn’t burned itself to the ground by the time I get a screenplay into a director’s hands.[↩]
