Tag Archives: nostalgia

A Heaping Slice of Humble Pie

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This is quite possibly my roommate’s favorite story about my youth. In high school, there was a guy who loved to argue. He’d argue about anything, and he was never wrong. In his eyes. He was my friend, despite the massive headaches he gave me, and he stayed my friend for a long time. One thing that never changed was his insistence that he was always right, despite the evidence against his point. It should come as no surprise that he grew up to be a proud Republican who I can no longer talk to.

One day, I’m pretty sure this was senior year, he came to the group of nerds and misfits in the Gifted And Talented Education program, and he told us that we were pronouncing manicotti wrong this whole time. It wasn’t man-ih-COHT-ee, it was man-ih-CUHT. He’d know because he was Italian. This was, in my opinion, the stupidest thing I’d heard in quite some time. None of the nerds and misfits were swayed by his argument, and we all had to endure it whenever the word manicotti came up (which to be honest, was pretty rare) and he corrected us. He was ready to die on this hill.

One day, toward the end of our stretch in high school, he sheepishly came to the group of nerds and misfits in the Gifted And Talented Education program and confessed that he found out that it was indeed pronounced man-ih-COHT-ee. He had his bib and his fork out, prepared to eat a shitload of crow, and our reaction was only, “Yeah, we know.” The journey he went on had no effect on our lives in any way whatsoever. In retrospect, I wasted that moment. I should have treasured it because, in his forty-five years of life, this was the one time in history that this guy, this fucking guy, has ever admitted to being wrong about anything.

Also, Nicole and I pronounce it man-ih-CUHT now because that’s how much we love a good story.

Mixology

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In 1996, I cobbled together the most awesome, ambitious mix tape for myself. It was four sides, two ninety-minute cassettes full of my favorite songs at the time.

I can’t describe how much care and attention I went through to document the length of every song so that I could cram every one into each forty-five-minute side while minimizing the amount of dead time at the end of the tape.

I had to consider tone—the last thing I wanted to do was put a kick-ass rock song next to a gentle love ballad, unless the juxtaposition was my conscious goal.

When finally doing the actual recording, I had to sit there and play every song from beginning to end, making sure I didn’t accidentally include some of the next song in the album.

I also had to write out every song and artist on the paper insert in the tape case, and I had to make it perfectly matched the other cassette in my series.

And finally, I decorated each side identically with inappropriate stickers my friend Jeff had liberated from the pharmacy where he had worked.

Those mix tapes, as well as the mix tapes I made for other people, were a work of art, and I have never felt the same level of accomplishment or satisfaction with any CD I’ve burned or any of the dozens of playlists on iTunes I’ve put together as an adult.

I wish I knew what happened to those tapes (or the tapes others have made for me).

An Autopsy of my Nostalgia 

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I finished my typing project. I was only going to do 2002-2004, but I kept going backward, all the way to April 1999. I typed up a total of 162 entries, and there were only about a dozen between 1999 and 2001.  It turned out to cover almost my entire life in New York, give or take a few months here and there, and what a journey it was.  

Things I learned. 

1) I was really smug at times, and it was kind of hilarious, like watching a fourteen-year-old in his dad’s suit. 

2) My life in New York wasn’t some solid stretch of time. I went through several different phases where I was a different person throughout: a fish-out-of-water, a lonely single guy, a boyfriend, a rock ‘n’ roll bar fiend, and those all break down into subcategories.  
 

3) I had no idea how good I had it, particularly during that party guy stretch at the end. I had a solid, diverse group of friends, a city that was wide open with possibilities, and a comic book to illustrate. And I was so unhappy. It just goes to show that you don’t appreciate it until you don’t have it anymore.  

4) There are some friends who were real rock stars in that period of my life, some of whom are on Facebook, some of whom actually log into Facebook every once in a while, and one who is not on Facebook or really anywhere on the internet (I tracked down his email address a week ago and sent him a note, but he hasn’t responded, so that’s one door that’s thoroughly closed). If you’re one of these rock stars, you will likely be hearing from me soon; please don’t mind me, I’m feeling nostalgia.  

I don’t want to say I peaked twenty-three to seventeen years ago. As I mentioned above, I was pretty unhappy through all of it, looking for romance and not being satisfied when I found it. During my marriage, I traveled the world and properly treated the mental illnesses that plagued me, becoming a much happier person overall. I never want to go back there again. However, New York was a vibrant, exciting time in my life, and, as I approach retirement and the weeks kind of bleed into each other, I don’t think I’ll ever have that much fun again. What’s nice about these updates I’ve found is that I go into such detail that I am finding about dinner parties that I have no memory of, as well as the discovery that I went on TWO dates with that unusual girl I met at another party, not just the one, and just how much of a jerk one of my ex-friends could be.  

This was also a nice break from writing novels, which I’ve been doing nonstop for four years, and a little bit of inspiration for my next one. If I had to grade this little project, I give it an A+.  

Back in the Day

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If you’ve been paying attention to me, you’ll recall that I’ve stopped writing for a while to work on my current project, typing up the “weekly” updates I wrote to my friends across the country from 2002 to 2004, and hoo boy is it making me nostalgic. I’m under no illusions, however—I know how utterly miserable I could be at that time in my life, and it really bleeds through onto the updates. Obviously, I was bipolar the whole time and I didn’t know it, so my pattern was a few months of hypo-manic behavior, when I was about what most people would consider normal, if slightly tipsy (i.e. you know how you think, after a drink or two, that you’re particularly charming, funny, good-looking, and the coolest person in the room, even though you’re clearly not?); followed by a deep depression that was on the verge of crippling me. I could see this pattern in the writings I’ve gotten through so far—I’ve been working my way back from the last entry in April, 2004, and I am currently in November, 2002.

I’m finding all kinds of weird, sometimes life-changing adventures I had that I have no memory of, like one I ran into recently about how I went to the apartment of “Prince Nabi II of Persia,” who thought that I was a “beautiful man” but was not hitting on me. I’m also finding adventures that I lived through that I documented fully and in rich detail, such as the one I’ll know as “The Love Pentagram” (ask Barry about that one sometime). I’m also finding moments in my life that I will never forget, like the one where I’m pretty sure I got alcohol poisoning at a Halloween Satanicide concert and passed out on a friend’s couch and coated it in vomit, but I devoted maybe a paragraph to them. This has been quite the ride.

I’m seeing friends whose influence in my life I’d underestimated, and I’m seeing friends who were important to me being unrepresented entirely. There’s one in particular who was a really good friend during that period, and I’m not in touch with him anymore, at all. My attempt to reach out to him has been met with crickets, so I’ll just have to let that go. The other friends I have this unshakable urge to reach out to, and I may get to that, we’ll see. There’s one person I really want to say hi to and tell her how important she still is to me, but I know full well she won’t appreciate that, so I’ll have to let that one go too. This is nostalgia, folks.

What it took a while for me to notice was that, if you’re basing your idea on what you read in these updates, I quit smoking forever in November of 2002 and never looked back, when, in reality, I went right back to smoking by December of that year and kept on until May 2007.

Not to mention the drinking.

Imagine the kind of energy it takes to a commute the better part of an hour, work full day, then have an early dinner and drinks with a visiting friend or relative, then catch a movie (with or without a companion), then go out to drinks with another group of friends, then go to a rock concert in a bar with yet another group of friends, then ride the trains home longer than it took you to get here, and smoke a bunch of marijuana before going to bed. That’s the busy end of my schedule, but that kind of thing happened enough times that I’m exhausted just reading about it. Some weeks, I’d be out five days with people, eating and getting drunk. Add in the six months in 2002 and 2003 that I had a girlfriend, that was another person to spend time with. Seventeen-to-nineteen years was a long time ago. These days, I’m going to a Hall & Oates concert this Saturday, and I’m anticipating spending most of Sunday recovering from being out past my bedtime.

In the end, I have to say that I am extraordinarily grateful that I did these updates. They may have annoyed a lot of people who received them back then, but this was a brief, important part of my life, and I’m getting the chance to relive it. After April 2004, my next journal entry (when I started my Livejournal) was in September 2005, and it wasn’t very consistent after that. I didn’t blog or email about my move to Indiana or my wedding ten months later. I don’t really pick up any sort of regularity again until 2013, when I moved to Qatar, and, even then, I don’t really start doing it frequently until December 2018, and we all know what happened then.

I don’t know if this has inspired me to write more about myself—I’m not a very interesting person anymore—but it’s got me appreciating more what I have written and has encouraged me to relive my live at various eventful points and reminds me that I have lived a very exciting life. It’s dull now, but it doesn’t have to me. Maybe I’ll start looking it through that lens that I was wearing almost twenty years ago. Yeah …

I can go for that. (Getting worked up about tomorrow.)

A Gift of Platinum and China

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I struggled for a year about what I should do for the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The most obvious thing to do would be to go to New York and be there for it, but I really can’t. It’s not because of money or finding a place to stay or anything but because it’s not my New York. My New York is trapped in amber from 1998 to 2004 when subway fares were $1.50 and the Freedom Tower hadn’t even been conceived yet. My New York doesn’t exist anymore, just like the Jeremiah of 2001 doesn’t exist anymore either, and that is a mixed blessing. I thought of myself as a New Yorker for years after I moved on, but not anymore. I’ve lived in the greater DC area for thirteen years (minus the two-and-a-half I lived in Qatar), far longer than I lived in New York, or even New Mexico, which I consider my home (I won’t be going back there either). I made the decision I would stay home for the anniversary of the day the world ended.

New York has always been a city in flux, so it’s not only unrecognizable from 2001, but it’s also unrecognizable from 2014, the last time I was there. I think that really showed itself in the weeks following September 11, 2001. The Twin Towers had dominated the skyline for decades, looking like, as Donald Westlake described them, an upside-down pair of trousers. Suddenly, it was gone, and all that was left was wreckage that was still recognizable as the World Trade Center. After we finished running away, screaming, and when the dust settled, we had to return to our lives. There was an updated subway map on September 17. By September 24, I was back to work a block and a half from a smoking crater, having to take a ferry there from Hoboken because the PATH train went directly into the World Trade Center. We got used to the Towers’ absence really quickly, and life went on.

Except life didn’t. I was in a relationship at the time that was irreparably damaged by the events of that day and limped along for another five months out of sheer inertia before falling down and dying. The problem was she was shaken to her core by the attack, and she needed comfort. I was unable to give it because I had shut down my emotions to get me through that day, and they didn’t come back on for a long time. It didn’t help that I was drunk and high constantly for the two weeks following the incident. Not dealing with it was how I chose to deal with it.

As a sidebar, I met someone who would become one of my most fondly remembered friends as a result of that day. At the end of the month, someone threw a party for all the September birthdays that didn’t get celebrated that year, and I met this really cool young woman and wanted to be her friend right away. She was celebrating because 9/11 gave her the kick in the pants she needed to divorce her terrible spouse. As with everything, there were good side effects.

The vaccine-denying, election-overturning, polarized hate-fest that is modern America has a lot of roots in this day. There are a lot of milestones on the road to where we are now—the nomination of Ronald Reagan for president in 1980, the ascension of Newt Gingrich to Speaker of the House in 1995, and so on. However, as a result of being president on one of the worst days in American history, George W. Bush, who was well on his way to becoming a one-term president, became a two-term president, and the Republican Party really got the hang of hateful polarizing tribalism. Rudy Guiliani would have been a footnote in history had he not stood on the rubble and started barking orders. Do you remember flag pins? Do you remember what would happen to you politically if you didn’t wear one?

On the twentieth-anniversary year, we finally left Afghanistan, the country we destroyed in retaliation for the attack. When we first invaded in 2002, the Taliban was in control. In 2021, the Taliban is in control. As much dread as I feel for the people stuck there under this oppressive regime, I can’t help but shake my head and wonder what the fucking point of all of it was.

Osama bin Laden has been quoted saying he wanted to bankrupt the United States, not conquer it. People who were watching American troops loot Saddam’s palace a year and a half later were thinking, “U! S! A! We won! Take that, bin Laden!” But we have gone trillions in debt occupying countries and not actually helping anything. All of the precious freedoms President Bush said “they” hated were being signed away by the PATRIOT Act and other bits of legislation. Dick Cheney’s company Halliburton robbed the off-the-books budget and didn’t even pretend they weren’t doing it. Osama bin Laden wasn’t a stupid man. He accomplished his mission.

September 11 is a formative chapter in my life as a young man. I’m not a young man anymore. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush and Al Gore fought like gladiators over prescription-drug benefits for seniors. The summer of 2001, the most front-page headlines were about Gary Condit, a U.S. Representative who was suspected of killing his aide. America has not been young for a long time, but in 2000, 2001, the stakes seemed a little lower. We can’t go back to those days again. I can’t go back to those days again. I could go to New York, but it will be as foreign to me as San Francisco was when I went this summer. It would be like going back after a while to that coffee shop you frequented until you left the neighborhood, and the barista who knew you by name doesn’t recognize you anymore. In fact, we’re going to let Pearl Jam play us out with a little number from 1993, “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town.”

I seem to recognize your face
Haunting, familiar yet
I can’t seem to place it.
Cannot find a candle of thought to light your name
Lifetimes are catching up with me

The Spirit of The Post

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I used to work at the New York Post as a copy editor. I was only part time, and I only worked two days, then one day a week, but it was still a big part of my life that shaped me. I had a great boss, and if he wasn’t a surrogate father figure (I had a father, and he was doing the job nicely, thank you very much), he was, at the least, a surrogate uncle who really cared for me and looked out for my well being. I was a floater, so I took the desk of anyone who wasn’t working the particular day I came on, and, on Sundays, that put me on the other side of the cubicle from Dominick Marrano.

Dom intimidated me at first because he’s pretty much central casting for Brooklyn Mafia (so much so that he attempted to try out for the Sopranos when they were doing a casting call in New York), but I quickly learned that intimidation was the wrong reaction to have to him. He’s friendly, kind, and generous, and most of all, full of mirth. He’s laughing in all of the pictures I’ve ever seen of him, and that’s perfect because that’s how I remember him.

Probably my most vivid memory of Dom I had was one day when the pagination printer next to his desk was on the fritz, and it kept letting out this horrible beep/squeal noise. I muttered, “I think it’s backing up.” Dom heard this and thought it was the most hilarious thing because he told anybody who passed by his desk what I said. He’s louder and more boisterous, so if that joke was going to spread around the newsroom, he was going to be the one who did it. And here’s the kicker: every time he told that joke, he made sure to give me credit for it. He was big that way with not stealing. Him delivering my jokes to a wider audience than my shy self would reach was something that happened a few more times during my evenings there.

Dom passed away on Sunday after a long battle with lung cancer and emphysema. The New York Post page I follow on Facebook, as well as his friends and coworkers making the announcement on my feed, have been inundated with comments of mourning and praise for this man. He retired twelve years ago, but he hasn’t been forgotten. I barely knew him, and I’ve been sad all week. He was always there the six years that I worked at the Post, and even his retirement came as a shock to me. I guess I just assumed he always would be there.

I don’t know what you believe about the afterlife, but I like to picture him somewhere comfortable, drinking a coffee, maybe the alcoholic beverage of his choice, and laughing. He taught me that things are hilarious, and you need to embrace that.

Goodbye, Dom. I miss you.

What’re YOU Lookin’ At?

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Random memory: This was in New York in the fall of 1998, and Shane and I were relaxing out by a construction sight that would become Trump Tower (or was near an already constructed Trump Tower—that part’s pretty hazy). We happened upon a large piece of broken drywall, and Shane decided that this was art. He always carried around his pastels, so he set to work bringing it to life.

Wearing shirts and ties, and me in my trench coat, Shane observed that I looked like a goombah, and, with nothing else to do, I put on a really bad Mafia accent and started harassing passersby, saying, “What’re YOU lookin’ at? What’d’you think this is, an aht gallery?” I started telling anyone who would listen about the artist and the drawing, using as many gangster cliches as we could think of, such as, “Look at that linewerk, it’s pretty good considerin’ both his thumbs are broken. Hey, he owed me money,” and “See the woman he’s paintin’? That’s Angelita, his one true love. Killin’ her was the hardest thing he ever had to do. Maybe next time you’ll keep it in yer pants, Angelita! You too, Joey, God rest yer soul.”

Eventually we had to go to work, that’s what we were doing in the Upper West Side to begin with, so we left his art leaning up against the fence of a construction site, with no illusions as to its fate. We chatted about it for a while, and we thought it would be fun to actually do the schtick in an art gallery, where Shane would actually paint something and I would taunt the gallery-goers. Keep in mind, this was when The Sopranos was just starting, and Analyze This (or its sequel) was a huge hit at the box office, so mobsters were huge at the time. That was one of many dreams that Shane and I had together those first few months I lived in New York, and like many, it just lived on in our imaginations.

An Orange on a Toothpick

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I watched this movie about a dozen times, maybe more, before I turned twenty. After I turned twenty, I’ve seen it twice, and the second time was last night. Watching it again, I understood what a formative role it had in the development of my identity as a social being, something I’ve fallen completely away from. The movie is So I Married an Ax Murderer.

Aside from the extreme nostalgia I feel for the movie, it doesn’t really hold up. It’s very nineties, seen mostly in the outfits Anthony LaPaglia wore, but also in locations like a beatnik coffee house and pre-tech-boom San Francisco, as well as oversized posters and Nancy Travis. This was before Mike Myers really solidified his brand, so he was looser here and a lot more charming, but you could still see, peeking through, cringeworthy habits that would ultimately lead to The Love Guru. I’ll be honest, I was DMing a friend about San Francisco the entire time the movie was on, and I didn’t miss a thing because I had the whole thing memorized, from all of the butcher-shop flirtations to my second-favorite rendition of “Do You Think I’m Sexy.” (My first will always be The Revolting Cocks. Sorry, Mike.)

I cannot overstate how much I wanted to be Mike Myers in this movie when I was young, specifically Charlie Stewart with his sentimental creativity and energetic sense of humor. I had his hair, coincidentally, for many years. I was trying to be my funniest at this point in my life, and this movie helped me develop that. (And no, I’m not talking about screaming out in a terrible Scottish accent, “Head! Pants! Now!”) I was never as funny as Mike Myers could be, but I held my own. I could never quite work out how to use humor as flirting, but again, I held my own. That was a long time ago. These days, when I’m relaxed, I can still be funny, but I don’t have the full-body gusto that I used to have. This movie made me really miss it.

I think, if you’re a certain age, it’s a pretty great little movie. Maybe you can remember the days when you and your peers pretended to be his Scottish father (also Mike Myers because, if there’s one thing he can never do wrong, it’s Scottish), shouting at each other, or maybe you’ll be amused by the love story, such as it was. It was an original story, not based on overexposed, underdeveloped Saturday Night Live characters, so it had that going for it. Mostly, it was a movie where they got this budding comedian to screw around on camera for ninety minutes, and you know what? It can be an absolute joy to watch. Next, I think I have a duty to write short essays about other movies I’ve seen over ten times and how they influenced my life. That means Face/Off and The Highlander.    

That Not-so-Fresh Feeling

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I think one of the all-time highs of my time waiting tables was at the Village Inn, by the now-defunct mall in Hastings, Nebraska. This restaurant was open an hour past the last call of all the bars in the region, so Friday and Saturday nights after one a.m. were, I will say, quite colorful. One particular group of regulars owned a bar in nearby Blue Hill, and they appeared to be its biggest patrons. They were a rowdy bunch, but they tipped me in cases of beer, so, as a not-twenty-one-year-old, I was awfully permissive.

On the night in question, one of the women in the group, while waiting for her greasy breakfast food to arrive, emptied out her purse onto the table. She then grabbed every feminine hygiene product she had with plastic applicators, shoved them into her ears, her nostrils, and her mouth, like a pair of fangs, and flailed around, screaming, “I’m Tampon Lady! I’m Tampon Lady!” At that point, permissiveness wasn’t appropriate anymore, so my manager and I had to intervene. When she left, I quietly told them that it wasn’t my idea to come scold them, and I thought Tampon Lady was hilarious. Just like that, we were friends again, as evidenced by the case of beer under my car.

Even now, twenty-five years later, I wonder about Tampon Lady. Did she truly believe that with great power comes great responsibility? Is she still stalking the dark, unforgiving streets of Blue Hill, Nebraska on her hunt for justice? Did she pick up a sidekick, Pad Lad? Does she have a nemesis, The Red Tide? I will never know. I can only hope, as I gaze out into the full moon, that she is out there, the Absorbent Protector, the Stringed Crusader, looking up at that same moon, knowing that law and order is prevailing.

Tampon Lady, I salute you.

A Shining City on a Hill

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I have lately been baffled by the eighties. I’m not baffled by the fact that they exist, or by shoulder pads. I’m baffled by the sheer reverence of that decade, and how it’s not going away. I remember people being nostalgic for the eighties in the nineties, and that was almost thirty years ago. The eighties are to the nineties, aughts, teens, and twenties what the fifties were to the sixties, seventies, and eighties.

Everything is the eighties now. Joker was set in the eighties for no real reason, Punky Brewster just came back, and let’s not forget Stranger Things and IT: Chapter One. We had a new She-Ra a couple of years ago, and a new He-Man is on its way. So is Beetlejuice 2. And those are just the examples I could think of off of the top of my head. Name an eighties band, and I’ll bet you a dollar they’re still touring. The eighties even gets all the credit for Saved by the Bell (which also just returned) when that show mostly aired in the nineties.

Like the fifties, they were far from idyllic. The Cold War, which had become less of a priority in the late seventies, got cranked up by a president so insane that we weren’t sure if we were all going to die in a nuclear war. AIDS and homophobia were pretty big back then. The hatred of government that Reagan fostered led to a lot of government services shutting down, especially mental health, leading to a lot of the visible homelessness we’ve seen since. Deregulation turned our beloved children’s entertainment into commercials for toys that my parents couldn’t afford to buy.

I don’t really get the fondness for the eighties because I missed that decade while it was going on. While my peers were watching John Hughes movies and listening to Duran Duran, I was watching Airplane and the Marx Brothers and listening to “Weird Al” Yankovic and the Beatles. I discovered culture in the nineties, so that’s my decade, a decade that gets no love whatsoever. My warm fuzzies come not from leg-warmers and big hair but from heavy layers, chokers, and Doc Martins. Imagine my delight when Captain Marvel took place in the nineties, and her secret identity was a NIN T-shirt.

I know why the eighties were so popular: they were a colorful time with catchy music, easily identifiable fashion, and memorable tropes that are easy to replicate. The nineties are really hard to sum up in an easy image. There was grunge and gangster rap, but there was also the rise of boy bands and Brittany Spears. There was the Real World—that was uniquely nineties. It was kind of a weird decade. If you tried to pinpoint something that was the aughts, for example, you have what? Low-rise jeans? A long series of economic recessions? I guess the eighties really was the last decade you could draw a caricature of and have it be on-the-nose.

Nostalgia just is. I’m not going to talk about the dark side of it because that’s not what this post is about. If neon leotards and “Tainted Love” are what make you happy, then enjoy it. There’s so much in the world that makes us feel awful that you should stick to the thing that causes you joy. For me, that means pulling on my flannel and listening to Nirvana. Just be happy.