When I was a kid I used to fantasize about the possibility of being a superhero and if so, which one would I want to be? Which superpower was the coolest to have?
There were the normal adolescent temptations – x-ray vision like Superman so you could see into the girl’s locker room, the ability to disrupt the forces of nature like Storm (of X-MEN fame) so you could cause endless snow days and skip school, or the ability to create fire Prometheus style like Torch (another X-Men dude) because, well, that’s just cool.
These days the likes of Batman and Iron Man are cool because all they are are really normal dudes with a lot of money, really cool cars, and lots of hot women lurking around – what’s not to love?
But then the other day, I was sort of creating my own superpower and I came up with the idea of “pressing the reset button.” It’s cerebral I know and doesn’t quite yet have the mass market appeal of a Superman or Hulk or whatever, and it may truly be a function of middle aged monotony and existentialism, but check it out:
Every once in a while one is faced with either professional or personal situations in which, upon deeper evaluation, you determine you are just plain f’cked. It’s just like a labyrinth of sucky options. Sure, there’s the old “Deepak Chopra creative solution” approach or there’s the more cynical “damn, this sucks” evaluation in which case having the “press the reset button” super power would be wicked helpful. Here’s how it would work. When face with one of the aforementioned shitty situations, you could just hit said metaphorical button, go back to a seminal moment in which you made a critical choice which may have been the first step on a path that led to where you currently are, and you could just, you’know, make a different choice.
Of course, this all raises some rather existential quandaries: is the present moment really reliant on one choice? Is it an amalgamation of every prior moment, every prior choice between this one? Say for example, that one time when I was 8 years old and I consciously made the choice to pee in my pants at night rather than get up at night and go use the bathroom, had I made the extra effort, would I be a different man today?
Too far afield to wonder quite honestly, perhaps another blog for another day. Back to being “Resetman” – that’s kind of cool actually. It really is a more cerebral version of Superman’s ability to spin the Earth backwards on its own access, which truthfully is more of a “rewind” power than a “reset’ one. Alas….
Here’s a better example. When I was in college and I was wooing my current wife (as if I had one before her, huh?), I momentarily became obsessed with a Celine Dion song called THE POWER OF LOVE. Inexplicably, I would blast it from my college dorm room. I like to think I never really sang along to it, but who the hell knows, I may have just conveniently blacked that out in which case, thank you subconscious.
Anyway – I’d really like to “reset” that moment. I’m just kind of ashamed of that time of my life and I feel like I could be a better person, husband, and father if I just never did that. It would be really cool if I could just reset that first time I hit play on my DVD player or switch out to a Tupac album or something.
There are other moments I’d take a crack at but I won’t list them. And of course, there is a current scenario which I can’t really describe in which I fantasize about going back and hitting reset with the suspicion that doing so would mean that I would not be in the situation I find myself in now.
A disclaimer of sorts: my marriage is not in trouble nor does this involve any illicit indiscretions. Okay, I better stop, lest this blog itself become a moment that requires resetting.