Marinating in Misdirection

I'm seventeen again for a moment. Trudging along somewhere between 14 and 25. Glancing around at the happy couples, I feel grossly misplaced. Looking over toward the pool, at the grinding crowd of single students, I feel grossly misplaced. Limbo in a hot tub time machine remembering that this year I'll be 23 as I'm offered a bucket of beer for the twentieth time today.
Any drinks from the bar?
No, thank you.
You sure? Buy four beers and you get one free.
No.
The more you spend the more you save. I pray that no one for no one's sake would fall for such a transparent marketing gimmick. I'm strung and stretched between carefree and maturity. Having to angle the bar so that it will support the heavy shower curtain. Drenched and collapsing just when your mind wanders to other things.
The sun beats down on us as I apply more sunscreen to my bald head. Maybe I'll be 30 this year. I don't want the peeling to be too severe. The same waiter walks by without so much as a glance in our direction. I see on his user-friendly name tag that he's from Zimbabwe. Hello, Mickel, how may you serve me today? As Mickel tears the name tag away from my groping eyes and throws it overboard. And so the revolution begins. I can only imagine what he's thinking while he traverses the deck. Does he think that this is a good job? Does he prefer Bud Light over Corona Light? Is he laughing secretly at them? At us? At me?
How much disdain can a Zimbabwean mask behind a grin?
My two twitterpated friends are getting into a tickle war. I laugh and watch as they embrace happiness. No longer seventeen and gagging again. Instead I am proud to have such happy friends. Moving away to the opposite side, I distract myself with the hair on my forearm. As the suds dry, the hair remains slicked down as if I used gel. If my arm hair were long enough, would I spike it or trim it? Or alternate the two?
The Zimbabwean waiter is watching us. Upon eye contact he turns away, back to his shadow.

Sailing away with STDs

You missed it. You got there, but too late. Everyone is talking about it. You're picking up bits, pieces, yet nothing. You just had to be there, they tell you. You should have been there, sure, but you weren't. Finally, when no one cares, you're told a dispassionate version. I slipped on the ice yesterday, flipped backward, did a full backflip, and then landed on my feet. Disprove it.
Perspective. Point of view. Opinion. Blinking. Bias. Beliefs. All affect. Experiences experienced, but none completely by any one. You will never be younger than you are now, and the story too.
Stories are told and then forgotten. Others are remembered. Recorded. Repeated. Recited. Some become a part of history. Some more mainstream than others. Passing into legend, taken as fact. Reborn in novels, fewer still in the cinema.
Stories are dynamic, changing, and often fictional. You wish you were there, but you missed it. We've read our history. Reading it in a history book we likely missed out. Maybe we should have been there...
What's the point of this, you may be wondering? Fragmented sentences and improper grammar? That, yes, and time travel. That's right, bad grammar and time travel. I want to travel through time. I don't care so much about my friends' great stories as I do about legendary events. You know what I'm talking about. What guy wouldn't want to travel back to ancient Greece to see whether or not Helen of Troy was really all that hot? What's the deal with Stonehenge anyway? Was Napoleon really that short? Did Cleopatra really commit suicide with a boob snake bite? Was Leonardo da Vinci really gay? Also, can we tell Christopher Columbus that he's going to pick up syphilis in the Caribbean? Bad idea, Chris. Just sayin'. Again, keeping it in the pants would have saved Europe some grief.
The implications are as profound as they are hopelessly unlikely. If we ever work anything out in the time travel branch of science, I nominate myself as the man who should go first.