have i mentioned this before?

Don't you hate it when you see your ideas portrayed on television before you could even break into the medium? I say this in regard of the last episode of Lost. I need to hurry and comment on it before the new episode airs anyway.

When I was a kid I had a lot of deja vu. A lot. Seriously I recognized what it was several years before even learning the term. Of course, just learning what it was called didn't really explain it. Has anyone explained it? As far as I know, the first time anybody tried to explain the actual phenomenon to me was only relatively recently when I watched The Matrix for the first time. So as a kid, it was up to me to explain it. As far as I knew, I was the only one who ever experienced it and I came up with the most logical thing I could think of.

I figured that at some point in my distant future, I would come across a time machine or some kind of space-time anomaly. When you're a kid and the year 2000 was only 15 or so years away, such thinking was not too crazy. So anyway, through whatever time conveyance, I would become a time traveler and choose to go back in time. My reason for this would probably be to meet myself and give myself advice about life or something. Little would I realize that certain laws of matter would need to be obeyed and it wouldn't just be like Back to the Future where during my period in another time there would just be two of me. No. Instead I would just be transferred back into the body and consciousness of my former self, because I'd break a cosmic law of some sort if two of the exact same entity existed in the same universe. Now, since I inhabited the same consciousness as before I would have no memory of my time travel and would then continue my life all over again as if nothing happened. My future self would have absolutely no influence on how I re-lived my life up to the point that I re-discover the method of time travel. I would then make the exact same decision to go back in time and infinitely repeat the process. I would become immortal in the sense that I would never die, but damned to any sort of progression or relief from this life. Even if the universe ended at some point, it would be a point I would never come across.

Deja vu happened not because things merely seemed familiar, but because things were exactly the same. Somehow, in all the infinite loops, some shadows of past perception got clogged up in the mix. Of course, even a small change in perception could possibly lead to a change in action, but the concept itself frightened me a little. Even though my decisions wouldn't actually be determined by anyone but me, a sense of fate still pervaded the entire scenario.

So last Wednesday I see Lost and my concept is pretty much all right there. I'll never get my dues. What's worse is that I'll never get my dues over and over again.

Anyway, I'm curious how they play out this whole fate thing in the Lost universe. Fate really is an uncool device. The decisions characters make have no dynamic when they're supposed to make those decisions anyway. It pretty much takes away all the glee that comes with heroism and all the despair that comes with failure. What's left? Boredom. This whole situation with Desmond is pretty eastern religiony. The point of many eastern religions is that escape from the cycle of rebirths is not only possible, but ideal. Although, it would give me a lot of enjoyment if Lost totally teases the whole "overcoming fate thing" and then pulls the rug out. Suddenly we're left to realize that Desmond can't escape his destiny, Locke really can be told what he can't do and the others really are the good guys... but only because the victors write the history books.

By the way, I still can't explain deja vu, but I hardly ever have it anymore. Does that mean escaped my infinity crisis loop? Did all that deja vu actually change my actions? Did I actually overcome? Strangely, as the world gets less and less familiar, I wonder if whatever I've done has been for the good.