Nostalgia Will Hit You as Hard as It Can

Those records you played are from 30 years ago. That movie you’ve streamed came out in 1977. Its creator has altered it so many times you don’t even remember where the cuts lines are.

Nostalgia. Like a big Vegas casino pumping oxygen and free drinks into whoever’s gambling, it’s all over the culture. Itchy and cringy and oh, so familiar. How could it possible be bad for me? Many run headlong into its icky embrace for comfort. People will pick familiar suffering over the scary unknown because learning about new things is hard. Gaining new knowledge of ourselves is often difficult, raising insecurity and possibly every facet of their life decisions. For some, this is a painful, unnecessary venture so why do it. So now that you accept feeling retro (once again), there will be no new learning today. The illusion metastasis into delusion. You are quickly face-to-face with your own emerging fuddy duddy-ness.

Nostalgia is like a rash you are convinced makes you look good. Better even. It’s the warm blanket you sweat into when getting overheated, being sick or fucking. A cacophony of fluids archived into the fabric. At the time, it means nothing to you so no bother washing it. But one day, it feels old & worn so you put it under the bed and forget the soiled thing. Years later, you unbox that blanket and it is your new, favorite old thing. So many memories, you sigh to yourself, as you wrap it around your head like a skull toga. You feel the lines on your face vanish, but it’s an endorphin rush, fake as the weight loss drug you buy off the internet. A false nod to the no longer young body you still inhabit like a crumbling house with a new coat of paint. You give it no mind. It’s a feeling, you think. The brain reels, submitting to the feels. A chemical cocktail in the bloodstream makes happy sadness inside you. A emotional experience akin to some form of mental illness. Memory making a fool of you again like poor eyewitness testimony to a horrible accident. The facts never add up the way you thought they would so you punt on the existential math. You should go talk with a professional to help sort this out, but it will only make it worse, you tell yourself. The price of longevity is convincing yourself out of healthy life decisions because “you know yourself better.” Cue the midlife crisis, etc.  

Nostalgia. I am not immune to its easy charms. Case in point, I stumbled across the Fight Club 2 trailer on the internet a few weeks back and watched it with a ton of apprehension. Ten seconds into it, a weird mirth hit me as I saw an aged Narrator and graying Tyler Durden talk Marla, Project Mayhem and doing it all over again. One more big score before getting chucked out the mortality door! My emotions peeked, but I remained cautiously cynical. That in itself, made me feel like I was in my 20s again. Likely by design. I might want to see this sequel! Yet, it was an aberration. A straight-up fake stitched together with Fight Club footage, other film footage and convincing AI trickery. I was the target audience and the fool fooled, convinced there was something special here like hidden drugs or candy!  And like sugar or illicit substances, they give us much in the moment as we try and twist ourselves into younger versions of our older selves.

That very day, I bought a used copy of the graphic novel Fight Club 2 off Amazon. I streamed The Dust Brothers film soundtrack. I may have fondled my very own first edition copy of Fight Club. For a few moments, my world levitated to the year 1999. I was living in the city of Chicago. It was my home and playground. That was the year I interviewed Chuck Palahniuk for a now defunct bookstore chain. Time would soon be creeping into the 21st century. The penance of humanities lack of vision would take the form of planes dropping out of the sky as the world went dark from Y2K.

Fight Club tried to teach empathy & individuality while leaned into entropy & brutality. You have failed, it preached, but that is all part of the plan. You fail to evolve. You fail to understand. You fail just like we are all failing the planet. Shitting the bed of the present and future, all at the same time. Multitasking a more miserable world for our children, you must give up because there is nothing else you can do. Everywhere is moving and everything must change. It’s a part of this game called living. The amusement park known as life. I suspect our light was shoved into these biological vessels for a while to see what would happen while we had these human experiences. You don’t have to accept this reality, but you must bear to live it.

I’m going to end this rant with some Tyler Durden-like advice: Don’t forget you are a fucking supernova. You have more because you are more. You are the sun and the moon. Warm and cold radiance. Reinventing continuously so they cannot touch you. The nostalgic fear the new. Make them afraid. You don’t have to be. Appreciate the wonder of it all.