Introducing The Conditional Clause

It is in my nature to ask the universe, "What if?" It is the thing that puts me squarely in the creative set, and has bound me to a world of fiction and other made up stuff for the life I have been living. I do this a lot when I am riding my bike to school. It is true that quite often those musings lean toward the "What if I had a car?" Then there are the other days, when I imagine all kinds of different things from outcomes to scenarios that might have turned out differently "if only."
So there's that hanging chad: "If." Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about it. Malcolm McDowell starred in a movie about it. Many of us have lost sleep over that tiny little word. What if a robot came back from the future to kill the lady who would become the mother of the anti-robot rebellion? There's Arnold Schwarzenegger's career. I'm telling you, this is powerful stuff.
Which is why I don't tend to turn it on myself very often.
What if I had paid more attention in those math classes?
What if I had put a little more effort into the science classes?
What if I had not been so swept up in science fiction and fantasy as a kid?
What if I had considered a career path in my twenties?
I like to fix things. I could have been a TV repairman. What if I had done that?
Who repairs TVs anymore?
What if I had become a doctor? Instead of memorizing entire screenplays full of dialogue, I could have committed all those body parts and fluids to memory and made a find living off all that useful knowledge.
What if I would have spent as much time working at promoting my writing career as I did creating all those stories of drunken escapades?
Then I wouldn't be sitting here now, enjoying the trip that brought me to this place. I took the road less marked by regret. What if I stopped saying "what if?"