Pulling wings off the butterfly effect in Normal entries

After reading and watching dozens of books and movies about the butterfly effect I finally googled it today. Why? Shit I don’t know. If I just said curiosity and could go ahead and speculate on dairy farming in Alabama where the milks sours from stupidity or humidity or one of those things that it’s-not-the heat-but-the … For the record I don’t think Alabama cows are dumber than, say, Calgary cows or cows raised in a skinner box.

I’m sure there’s a word for it, the French must have like five phrases for it, but I can’t think of one. Let’s call it sheepish curiosity. It’s like when you’ve accepted something as a workable idea by the sheer weight and frequency of times you’ve heard it and then way too late you decide to look behind the curtain sure that you’ll find some little old guy working the great wizard. It’s not like I’ve killed anybody over the butterfly effect or even stole a pack of juicy fruit that wasn’t very good anyhow over it, but, you, I suspended a lot of disbelief.

It’s like Schrodinger’s cat or, foreshadow much(?), a skinner box, except, unlike those, there isn’t really a metaphorical lesson or real-life analogy. One wouldn’t be too far off the mark to call it plain old dairy cow cause and effect. You are welcome to a kinder and gentler opinion, please; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

Time travel science fiction loves the butterfly effect. I couldn’t have been older than ten when I read that Ray Bradbury short story that literally had a butterfly stomped on a time travel safari. I can’t remember the name … wait, I think it was A Delicate Sound of Thunder or something like that. Some idiot client steps on a butterfly on a trip to see dinosaurs and when they come back the future is all fucked up. Christ, I loved Ray Bradbury when I was ten. I don’t mean to suggest his work was juvenile or anything, I don’t know, I read all of it before puberty, so, in my personal experience it was for juveniles.

It’s not like that butterfly hasn’t popped up a zillion times in the last cough cough 47 years. Always in science fiction. I suppose it’d be hard to work into a romance or crime thriller. A whole lot of time travel stories are based on how you can fuck up the future. Even without time travel we managed to daily both fuck up and save the future depending on whether you like tomorrow or not. I’m pretty sure anyone who is reading this thinks Trump is fucking up the future, otherwise you’re on the wrong page.

I was trying to think of an original way of using that. I didn’t find one. Of course, every story is a variation of like forty-three plots and those had all been written long before our grandfathers had been born. Time travel stories are one of the same old plots with time travel cut and pasted onto it.

Best I came up with was pseudo theological. One of those white guys who got paid to be a philosopher said something like God doesn’t have to be all powerful or all knowing or Omni anything, he just needs to be more powerful and knowledgeable and generally Omni-something than you, just enough for us not to understand. The same guy came up with the notion that instead of keeping his (for lack of a God-ier personal pronoun) eye on every damn sparrow and reinventing the wheel every time the world gets a flat, God came up with contrivances. Like, for instance, rain and sun so he didn’t have to attend the life cycle of every fucking plant. Huh, it’s a wonder that dead white dude wasn’t hung for heresy.

So, imagine that there actually is predestination and it’s a contrivance so god doesn’t have to always be paying attention to us fucking up (for example) or keeping a list of who is naughty and who’s nice for eternal reward or punishment. Say, maybe, he creates a handful of types, throws in genetic variance, and just lets the world turn. I’m not trying to convince of this, just setting up a butterfly narrative. So, some guy, probably Tom fucking Cruise, invents time travel and goes back.

He doesn’t even have to do anything, his presence in the past alone is enough to unravel Gods contrivance, and God of course, has been busy doing other shit ever since the monkeys starting talking and keeping livestock. Now, instead of just fucking up the future, like turning a Persian rug into a Nazi flag on account of some butterfly; there’s all of the sudden no plan at all and it ripples both directions in time and, in keeping with the rug analogy, the whole concept of rugs is just plain old gone.

It’s not an original story (or I wouldn’t be giving to y’all unwrit) but it’s a novel way of putting the bits together. And I’m spent.