Introduction to the story about choice.

The Day That I Was No Longer Perfect
By Price Hamilton

I remember the day that I was no longer perfect. But, like any story that is truly woth telling, it is a story that cannot be told in one setting, nor is it a story that can simply be jumped into mid stride.
In our lives there are a million different choices, large and small, that we make daily. Any one of these choices could lead us to lasting happiness or indescribable misery. You could find a dollar on the roadside and us it to purchase the jackpot winning lotto ticket from the nearest mini-mart/gas station, or you could use that same dollar to purchase a cup of drip coffee for a homeless guy begging for change on a cold winter day. One choice leads to a large extrinsic reward based on a game of chance, the other to a purely intrinsic reward centered in knowing that you did something kind for another soul.
Similarly, you could exit a building, turn one direction and live a relatively worry free life where if you had gone in the opposite direction you would find nothing but strife and misfortune regular bed mates. James Christensen, a brilliant fantasy artist, once painted an images called the Voyage of the Bassett in which he poses a similar philosophic question by telling the story of a mythology professor in Victorian England who, along with his two daughters, boards a ship called the H.M.S. Bassett, crewed by a host of goblins, dwarves, and other mythical creatures, and sets sail for adventures unknown. Christensen once said of the image that he always wondered what would have happened if Darwin had turned his ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, left instead of right. Would he still have come back with the theory of evolution? Or would he perhaps have returned with some other variation on the theme. Instead of studying pond scum and algae formations would he have discovered dragons, chimera, harpies, and all manner of fantastic creatures? Perhaps we would have a theory of transformation where species change almost instantly instead of progressively over centuries. Truth told, he still would have found pond scum and algae, but the idea of other places and magical creatures is very alluring. A crypto-zoological explanation of the evolution of species would be much more exciting than the run of the mill evolved from apes shtick.
I digress. The fact is, and the point I am trying to make is, everything in life boils down to choice. Our attitude towards any given situation in life is based purely in choice; we can choose to be angry, cheerful, vengeful, apathetic, or any of an infinite other emotional options.
More often than not, we find ourselves ruled by emotion or situation, a common problem in my own downward spiral, but we never notice this until it is too late. I’ve always hated the cliché “hind sight is 20/20” because it’s only true when you screw up. You never make a decision that ends well and say “Whew, I wish I’d never invested in Google back when it was an unknown web engine! All this damn money is just too much of a bother. I think I’ll go out and buy my own island tomorrow to make myself feel better!” Instead it’s always things like “Gee, perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to try and hold up that all-night Korean grocer with the Muay Thai Boxing dojo in the back room because I just got my ass kicked by a three-foot-tall Bruce Lee look-a-like who talks with a lisp.” or “Perhaps I should have checked the gas gage to make sure the getaway wasn’t on empty before robbing the bank this morning. If I had, this plan would have gone much more effectively.” It’s always the times when things are not going their smoothes that we wish we could go back in time and change them. Is it really any wonder that these are the moments when we find ourselves driven more by emotion than by logic—I think not.
When we are ruled by emotion we give up our ability to choose and we let impulse be our guide. We end up jumping from one moment to the next without regard for the possible ramifications our actions may have. Children function in this way. They have not developed the cognitive thinking skills to choose between one course of action or the next. They take their cure form the care giver whom they are seeking approval from. They recognize that if their actions are followed by a smile, laugh, hug, or some other cross breed of extrinsic and intrinsic gratification then their choice was a good one. On the other hand, if they are punished for their actions, talked to with a stern/disapproving voice, put in time out, grounded, etc … their actions were ill thought and not the best. In this way it is the adult, not the child, who is responsible for the final outcome. Is it any wonder that they are confused half the time? My two-year-old ran over to his mother the other day, sat on her lap, and cut loose a fart that would have made any eighty-year-old rest home resident weep with pride. At the time we laughed because it was completely unexpected, obviously a practice that we did not want to encourage (or so his mother says; I think having a kid who will randomly fart on people constitutes a novelty worthy of Letterman any night!). When, a few nights later, my son declared “I poop on Mommy”, and he ran over to her a second time ready to let fly with him own personal perfume, we didn’t laugh—well Sarah didn’t. Instead, we punished him by placing him in time out and trying to explain why it is wrong to “toot” (Sarah’s opposed to the vulgarity of the word fart) on people.
Was he confused? Sure was. His one argument was that “it’s funny, you laughed!” And he was right, I was laughing until I cried the first time … and the second time too. Sarah, on the other hand laughed the first time, but immediately noticed the pattern emerging and knew to stop it. So how do kids know what to do? Adults are so inconsistent! We reserve the right to act like kids all the time but refuse to be treated like one. Why do we, adults, people who should arguably know better, act like little children? Why do we give up our ability to choose how we will react to a given situation and instead allow emotion to govern the track that we will tread?
If you ask me, and since you are reading my book I assume you are, the answer is really quite simple. We are idiots. Oh, don’t get all huffy and upset on me, you will only prove my point to be accurate. Look, I’m no different, as my story will prove. Truth is, I’, probably one of the worst offenders. You will see, in the pages that follow, my own idiocy is not limited to simple poor decision and emotional outbreaks. It is the product of deceit, questionable morals and judgment, sloth, and the innocent desire to please everyone but myself. Despite all this, looking back at the progress of events that have brought me here, I realize how choice has played into it all.
When I was a kid I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books. The simple idea that I was in charge of the story, that the protagonist’s life or death was entirely dependent on which page I read next, was a very liberating prospect. No longer were storied dictated to me by an author who has plotted every thing out to their liking. I got to choose. I got to create. I got to deal with the decisions on my own. In some ways I think that these books are the one of the first real exposures to the consequences of choice that I had to reconcile on my own. When I made a poor decision at home, mom or dad, sometimes both, would teach me the consequences of my actions through some nefariously devised punishment—grounding, loss of TV and video game privileges, extra chores, no new-comic-book-Wednesdays for a month. I never got a do-over.
Sure I was apologetic, conciliatory, supplicant—especially on Wednesdays. I tried my best to make up for my actions by demonstrating my remorse. I apologized for my actions on numerous occasions; I apologized to the person that I wronged over and over, but I was never able to turn the page back and start again, to wind the clock back to an earlier hour, to pull a Superman and fly backwards around the earth fast enough to cause it and everyone on it the run around in reverse like a film stopped just after a crucial point and run in reverse to see it again.. Even when I did get a “do-over” the second go around was always tainted by the first.
In a Choose Your Own Adventure book if you die because you chose to try and swindle your way out of a bad deal while on a space station in the farthest reaches of the Alpha-Centari quadrant—never try to skip the bill on a one-eyed, tight fisted, Karplaok bookie—you can simply jump back to page 15 and instead choose to wash dishes for three lifetimes in order to pay off the debt you racked up playing to ponies. Sure, this is a much less exciting choice, and it doesn’t end in some grand space battle where you and your robot sidekick Chet face off against an entire armada of Karplokian battle cruisers, but you do learn a valuable lesson in gamboling and a profitable trade as well—it’s a well known fact that space stations are always in need to dish washers. You don’t die, maybe a slow self deprecating death, but not in a literal blaze of gory scrap metal charred flesh.
So what is the point to all this? Good question. See, you are farther into the game then I was when our story begins. Choice, huh. Remember, this is no Choose Your Own Adventure novel. 20/20 vision in place, I hope that I can convey this accurately. Memories live in that same ethereal place as choices. We make a decision, later rejoice or remorse in it, and eventually share it. Over time it becomes glossed over and we choose to leave in or out certain details that may end up being more supplemental. History is told from memory and memory is corruptible. I choose to tell the story that I want, and that is what this is … a story. Not a history, or biography, a story. More specifically, it’s a story about choice and the consequences, both immediate and far reaching, of the choices we make.