Would you go back in time and stay? When?

I'd relive the '90s just for all the sex I had during that decade.

 

The 90s were pretty good. Even with OKC and the Olympics bombing, those seemed to be so remote, outliers by whackjobs. Stuff that happens today seems to all be like a part of a bigger movement - made even worse by lack of action by those we expect to respond and remedy the situation - and in some cases INSTIGATED by the same - or even sanctioned.

 

I would like a week in my hometown during the early to mid '60s. Just a week, no more. I just would have liked to have seen the town when it had booming downtown traffic and commerce.

 

I think if that came true, and you could go back to Ebbets Field, Sportsmans Park, Shibe Park, the Polo Grounds, the pre-1968 Madison Square Garden, the Forum, the Olympia, Maple Leaf Gardens, etc., your first reaction would be, "Wow, this is cool."

Then about 20 minutes later, you'd look around and go, "What a frigging dump," after comparing it to today's stadiums. I sure did that at the LA Sports Arena, once a mecca. And, you couldn't get wifi.

The concession and ticket prices would be good, though.

 

Back when I was doing research into local high school football games, there was a game in 1937 that I would have loved to have covered in person because a player scored 75 points to set a state record that still stands today.

 

Y'all got to think outside the box. I'm not talking about reliving what you already did.
Heck, if I could go back to high school in the '80s and have a little money in my pocket in the '90s knowing what I know now, I'd be good to go. I'd be dropping hammer and buying Apple and Amazon stocks like they were going out of style.
Would you be willing to live in 1623 London or 1723 Charleston or 1823 New York or even 1923 your home town? Me? Naaaa.
If I could time travel and then return to the present, I wouldn't go back; I'd go forward to get new week's Powerball numbers.

 

I was just getting ready to reply that everyone is missing the “and stayed there”! I think I understood the assignment and picked 1975. Fix race relations, and feminist relations as were still in infancy, and THEN realized
today, with all the change and backward change, they still are. So I am in the 1975 loop.

 

I agree, we do seem to be reliving the 70s - gas prices, president in legal jeopardy, Mid-East tensions, inflation, the Reds are good.

 

I do think at times that being born a few years earlier to get The Summer of Love in college rather than the rise of Young Republicans would have been nice. However, we have longer life expectancies and better health care now than before.

 

And when you come back … a butterfly flaps its wings and four states away that affects the Powerball draw. You’ll win nothing and like it.

 

I'd relive this same life again and again and again, if only for the thrill and the joy of meeting and marrying my wife.

 

I was born in 1973 and was fortunate enough to catch the tail end of the 1970s and it's weirdness, to come of age in the optimistic go-go era of the 1980s -- when pop culture and sports were phenomenal -- and to enroll in college in the fall of 1991, when Nirvana, Soundgarden, Guns N Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, and Metallica all dropped seminal albums all within two months of each other. I missed the impact of the AIDs epidemic on my sex life, came out of college in 1995, right before the economy and the internet boomed, got a journalism job in 1996 and held one more or less full time till 2012, well past the implosion of that profession.

I guess if I were born, say, 10 years earlier I would have had a better chance of finding an audience for my fiction. But no one nowadays wants to read about a white, educated male who has seemingly had all the advantages. I have made relative peace with that, especially because I now have metastatic lung cancer -- which would have been a death sentence only a few years ago. But they're discovering new immunotherapies and other treatments -- outside overly invasive chemo and radiation -- all the time, and that gives me hope, gives my family hope. My brother-in-law died of melanoma in 1997, and would be alive today if he'd be diagnosed 20 years later.

That's the thing -- if you were to live in another time, you'd almost certainly have a different composite family, set of friends, health concerns, etc. So, no, I wouldn't wanna live in any other time, though if you gave me the opportunity to temporarily visit any era or moment in history, I'd wanna sit in on the Constitutional Convention and just listen.