Memory & Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a drug that eats memory. It kicks in right after you say the word remember, and when it works it starts flooding you with warm and pleasant lies. It’s insanely addictive. Works fast. Everybody sells it. It doesn’t kill you but it can destroy your brain; break the discipline of your memory. It’s fine and good to rifle through the past – time is something we’ll never understand, we’re just stuck perceiving it in one direction because we can’t outsmart entropy – but nostalgia invents a fake past we can’t learn from.

There are companies powerful enough to stage coups, be their own countries, that deal it out like Pablo Escobar. Coca-Cola, Disney, the NFL, McDonald’s, whoever it is that runs Nashville, pick your poison. But anybody can do it. Reminiscing about the good old days is cocaine cut with talcum powder.

This is starting to sound flowery but that’s really because I want to be good at identifying it. To be able to tell the difference between a real Depression-era 7up sign for my kitchen, or a decent replica, from a horrible one that belongs in a barber shop next to a sign about whiskey being cheaper than women that belongs in the garbage. An authentic old diner from one with Marilyn Monroe memorabilia that’s owned by a hedge fund. Why I’ll drive an hour to Pann’s in Inglewood but would have to let my entire life fall to ruin to eat at Mel’s. Why I’ve read multiple biographies of Charles Schulz but would rather claw my own eyes out than rewatch The Peanuts Movie. 

Memory is sex and nostalgia is pornography. You can do incredible things with memory, grow and love and learn from your mistakes, find reasons to live, but with nostalgia all you can really do is get a little closer to the grave and buy something about it.

First time I ever played a video game. My grandma had a little 1970s RCA TV in the sewing room of her back house. We had a Nintendo, it was only “the Nintendo,” and one game, that Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt two-in-one. Nostalgia says that was heaven on earth and I’d kill God to go back there with some pharmacy oatmeal cookies and a bottle of Yoo Hoo, but memory, which I have to work at, tells me something way more interesting, which is there were no windows in that sewing room and there was dirt everywhere and sometimes it’d get in your mouth when anybody opened a door and I had to stop playing when I was soaked in sweat and felt like I was in a coffin. 

Nintendo has considerably improved on that experience. I can play Super Mario Bros. whenever I want on a huge TV in an apartment with windows and a ceiling fan. I do this for maybe ten minutes a year, which sounds about right.

Used to hit a local diner after church. Nostalgia tells me it was perfect and I’m never eating that good ever again. Memory tells me the booths were comfortable but mostly I just had a high sugar tolerance and when I ate the leftovers out of a styrofoam container, they were terrible. The diner has since franchised and there’s one I drive by twice a week. I’ll probably never go.

Nostalgia says cell phones used to be more fun. All the metal and the sliding and the flipping. Pretty lights. Playing games in environments where previously no games were possible, magically tolerating waiting rooms. Memory says it cost several thousand dollars to send a text message and if you logged on to the internet, Motorola would send a man to harvest your organs.

Tried to watch a movie last night. Not a film. Just trying to zone out and capture that sense of watching some junk while eating leftovers. I put on The Naked Gun. It sounded like something I used to enjoy as a kid. But I had to turn it off because it was just Get Smart, an entire production of mostly just remembering that show and getting it right sometimes. I hated it. Right, here’s O.J. The juice is loose. Got it.

Went to find the real thing on streaming, but nobody had it. Lots of Naked Gun stuff, a Get Smart remake and a made-for-TV thing from the ‘80s, but the original was $2 an episode. Streaming is amazing at courting nostalgia but taking away the source material for that nostalgia, asking you to settle for reenactments unless you pay a premium. It’s a great tool, prying nostalgia from your brain when money is involved, because you’ll know when something actually used to be better and you’re not imagining it. Get Smart is as good as I remember. It’s Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

We used to go to Blockbuster every weekend. What a joy. Pizza, great movies, staying up late, laughing with my brothers. But actually the place was a racket. They never had anything good, it was always a wall of Armageddon plus miscellany, so I rented Dirty Work and Meatballs 30 times and my dad thought about Double Jeopardy but put it back. It was basically a scheme to make busy families rack up late fees and I always felt like I’d done a low-level sin when my dad had to pay extra money when he returned Mario Party, which wasn’t even good and I knew that then, four days late.

After my parents got divorced, I drove to the old Blockbuster with my brothers for the legitimate real life reason that we wanted to corrupt my youngest brother with Lethal Weapon but the torrent wasn’t downloading fast enough. It was the last time we went and I don’t even think we wound up returning the movie because the place was going out of business.

Forgot all about it, but years later, our youngest brother was now a properly corrupted teen. A pandemic was in full swing. Got a cell phone picture of him in a mask, strangers hovering at the edge of frame, a few feet taller looking like Rasputin and get a haircut if you’re reading this I’m still finding strands when I vacuum, standing in “the last Blockbuster.” That horrible little store that leeched like a thousand bucks from us was now a tourist attraction. There’s a documentary and a show about it. What an insane thing to elevate into nostalgia. You don’t miss Blockbuster, I swear. You miss being young. But I remember being 8 and getting miserably sad about things I used to do when I was 5. And now it doesn’t matter. You have better things to do.