life's all in the details

It's too late at night now to write anything academic, so I'm taking a break from my usual intellectual masturbation to write this. I can't spell very well. For the first time in my adult life I had to write something by hand I figured that out. I am probably a way slower typist because I have to go back and fix all those words with squiggly red lines underneath. I tell myself that it's because I think in concepts not words. I have no need to pay attention the details when only the broad concepts matter. Then I start to think -- mostly in my late night melancholic states -- that the details are all that matter.
Just because Kennedy got shot we forget that he cheated the 1960 election. He had dead people voting for him for in Illinois and Texas. Nixon should have won. In the history books these are just the details. Imagine for a moment if those details had turned out different. Imagine the American identity without the assassination of Kennedy as a cultural touchstone. Imagine if we never saw that video growing up as kids. Would Bobby have been shot? Would 9/11 of happened? Okay, now I'm just being melodramatic. That whole Butterfly Affect thing doesn't really make sense anyway. The whole thing is predicated on time travel, which for the most part doesn't even work in science fiction. I mean you can travel through time; we do it everyday. But time doesn't exist as linear -- that is, it isn't some river that we can travel down. Time and space are connected as a whole. My friend claims she time traveled once. It was in a blue Toyota Corolla. Her professor had made some off hand remark about cars being like time-travel machines and she hadn't really thought anything of it until once day when she was waiting for the bus and this blue Corolla picked her up. She got to school twenty minutes before she normally did when she was taking the bus. "Holy shit!" she thought to herself, "cars are time travel machines!"
I always liked that story. I'm twenty three years old and that the only time in my life that time travel made sense. It didn't make sense in Terminator 2, or in the last season of Heroes. Remember that girl that Peter just leaves in the future? If Peter prevented that terrible future from happening, if that future no longer exists, where the hell did she go? Here we go again with the details. Maybe that's why I stopped paying attention. Not enough of them make sense. Sometimes non of them do. Like why do I talk to myself out loud late at night? Or why must I always be narrating my own thoughts when I get up from the couch to grab a glass of water? Why are all my drunk friends calling me 4am? These are things I just can't seem to wrap my head around. Details.