Ah, nostalgia, you slay me…
Today I spent a very lazy Sunday lying around the house watching TV (it was raining)… including a comically abysmal episode of Knight Rider called Slammin Sammy’s Stunt Show Spectacular, wherein David Hasselhoff joins a family run stunt show, jumping K.I.T.T. over a moving truck twice! (both times using the same clip of a Kitt lookalike about to be wrecked as it plunges toward the tarmac in a near vertical dive). Whilst the show sucked even more than I remembered, the combined sense of nostalgia/loss it evoked was still strong– Loss of a sort of innocence, the innocence of a time when shit like this would pass for entertainment; a time when it didn’t seem like the most retarded premise in the world– the lone crusader in his talking car backed by seekrit money righting wrongs wherever they might be found.
I was similarly affected by a bunch of New Order clips from late 80′s… and then even a Kylie Minogue song from 1990! All sweeping me back to a simpler, more fatuous time. Add to the mix a 47-year-old Madonna doing her disco throwback number at the Grammys, only to realize that she’s probably been performing at music awards shows since people danced that way without irony.
Perhaps all this is heightened by my move to NZ, breaking so much of the continuity of my old life, where up until now only one major change tended to happen at a time. Now when something reminds me of the past the sensation seems sharpened by the awareness of the gulf that separates me now from me then … Like the Tasman Sea, which made me sad yesterday while I was out driving my new car– I suddenly realized that I couldn’t simply keep on driving and find myself back in Sydney, or even the small town where I grew up. This has never been the case before, and it struck me as a powerful personal metaphor.
I’m older than I’ve ever been (and now I’m even older) and I can’t ever go back. Of course I’ve always known this, but there are certain subtleties that are only now starting to sink in; like the fact that the past continues to recede, regardless of whether I choose to move forward. Standing still isn’t actually an option.
And, disturbingly, my memory is becoming shallower; less easily imprinted. This is perfectly normal of course, I just don’t like it. The only positive aspect of this trend is that when I do something embarrassing or stupid I won’t be able to dwell on it as effectively as I might with the crystal clear recall of my youth. The much more negative aspect is that even if something really great happens to me, it also won’t stick like it used to. This really bugs me, because past experience has shown me that really great stuff hardly ever happens, and when it does I’d really prefer that it go into my permanent store, rather than just be a fleeting sensation.
And so I find myself delving into my long term memory, and being a little alarmed at the mold and degradation I find. I’ve forgotten names, sequences of events, motives, resolutions… this is my life!
So I’m thinking that maybe a new project is in order, something like a memory blog, in which I could start writing down some of these scraps before the details and contexts are too far gone. It seems like it could be a useful exercise, but also like the sort of commitment I couldn’t possibly keep up, being more like a diary than a blog (and I never could keep a diary). Hmmmmmm…
__________
Previous nostalgia themed posts: http://intepid.com/index.php?s=nostalgia