Shut up brain, or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip!

I'm having one of those nights where I can't get to sleep because my brain won't shut up, most likely due to my considerable intake of caffeine a few hours ago after not consuming any for a while. I just had a random thought, which was this: I've always thought it would be cool if life had an undo button. This involves me doing something stupid, say, punching a cop in the face after getting pulled over for speeding, and then saying the magic words or doing the magic motions or whatever and basically going back in time a few seconds to right before I did that. On a side note, this power for some reason only affects the last thing I did - I never really planned it that way, or even thought about it till now, it just sort of happened. So I couldn't undo something that happened last week, only something that just happened. To use a Photoshop metaphor, it would be like hitting Ctrl+Z, but not being able to use the History at all. Anyway... so I was thinking about that for whatever reason, and then I thought, "What if once I undid something, I had no memory of what I undid?" Like, I knew I had the power, but beyond that I wouldn't even have any idea that I just undid something, much less what it was I undid. I have a feeling that, beyond the things I would do only because I had the power (like punching the cop in the face, stuff I would obviously never do normally), I would probably make one mistake, then undo it, then make the same mistake again because I didn't know I undid it, then undo it, then make the same mistake, then undo it, etc. And then my life wouldn't progress beyond that point at all. And then what? Like, tonight I thought, "What if I could go back in time and not drink all that Vault (oddly enough, this is the first time I've thought about using the power to go back more than a few seconds), but once I undid it, I wouldn't know that I had undone it - would I still drink all the Vault?" And I decided I probably would, and realized that without being able to retain the knowledge I learned from my mistakes, I would continue to make them over and over. And I wondered if this entirely hypothetical power would even be worth having. And then I decided to come on here and write about it because... why not? Also, while writing I decided a cool application of the power if I could remember everything and I could undo more than a few seconds would be using time to study or learn or whatever and then undoing that and playing Wii or watching a movie or something, all the while retaining the information I learned from the period of time I undid. Anyway, this got to be way longer than I planned. I'm sure tomorrow I'll wish I could undo all of this and spend the time trying to sleep instead. Oh well.

At twenty one you're on top of the scrapheap
At sixteen you were top of the class
All they taught you at school
Was how to be a good worker
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself

Just because you're better than me
Doesn't mean I'm lazy
Just because you're going forwards
Doesn't mean I'm going backwards
~"To Have and To Have Not" by Billy Bragg