death + time + nostalgia

As Margaret would tell you, I’m forever living in the past. I’ve been like this a long time. I kept a journal feverishly for many years starting in college, documenting every sensation and moment (in part to deliberately not interact with other dorm mates) and every couple years I’ll absently grab one and read a line and then get pulled in like a tractor beam until I’m back on the floor of Cedar Hall in autumn 1992, smoking cigarettes and drinking Black Velvet and documenting my obsession with a certain person or a certain film and lamenting how everyone is full of shit and how broke I am. I don’t know if nostalgia is the appropriate term b/c it is not necessarily a rose-colored turn backward, but it does at times approach a zealous fascination with who I was then and the details and signifiers of my life at various checkpoints. (At other times it approaches, let’s say a manic unhealthiness.) The older I get however, the more of these checkpoints there are and the further the distance between the me of now and the different zones of memory.

Recently I was cleaning up my basement office and opened the metal toolbox that has travelled with me from the undergraduate film program at Humboldt State, across nearly 3 decades, 2 states, 7 residences. It’s always just been a sort of fixture in the accumulations and detritus of my life, something I gave little regard to and just accepted. Inside I found several 16 and super 8 films of mine. I knew there were there, they’ve always been there, but this time seeing them activated a sort of burning white-hot urgency to get them transferred to digital and SEE THEM RIGHT FUCKING NOW before they were lost to the sands of time and subsumed by oblivion (note: I’m not being dramatic, these are the terms I think in which should probably be a gentle reminder to self to go back to therapy). I found a local man named Gary who does transfers and set it up with him.

Here are two of them. The first, One Wacky Mornin’, is shot on Super 8, features all my house-mates on Beverly Drive 1994 and Margaret who was then just my friend. The second is called The Omega Man (why though?) and features George running through the woods in 1995 and getting beat up and was shot at the 11th St house, after we moved out of Beverly.

There are multifold sensations here watching these films that can only be particular to me. At once a portrait of life then (ie, a visual not just rereading journal entries), a document of my nascent filmmaking (why oh why didn’t I focus the camera or make cleaner edits?), and humming underneath it all a sort of living breathing pulsing reminder that everything ends, everything dies, everything fades, everything changes. This sentiment alone can fuck me up for months at a stretch, though it’s not an intellectual conceit as much as a sort of emotional gut blow beyond my agency. These are the same sort of musings I had circa 1992, sort of nihilistic and collegiate in register. The older I get the more I feel this in a physical way, in my body, a cellular response.

So let me be honest: Lately, I have been deeply embedded again in the looking-back zone. Transferring these films were more symptom than end. Lately I’ve found old people I knew in passing 30 years ago and looked them up to see where they landed. Lately I hooked up the VCR and watched old video tapes that me or friends are in b/c i had to SEE THEM RIGHT FUCKING NOW before they too were lost to time. Lately, I am contemplating running a road race in a couple months in a tiny midwest town I was raised in for a few years, partially just for kicks and partially b/c I feel a sudden compulsion to return there. Why though? If I sit and and think on it, I have to presume it is some sort of reaction to middle-age, some sort of desperate flailing measure. I suppose if it’s in lieu of having an affair, or buying a suite of high-end power tools or whatever cliche mid-life crisis manifests, then I’d select this. But I have to confront the abnormal surge of what I guess can be deemed nostalgia, for want of a better term.

Possibly related: This morning I got up early and felt sudden panic/anxiety thrumming, a function of middle-age, each day propelling us/me closer to oblivion, a quick peek behind the curtain, the mammalian life-cycle nothing special or unique, no one coming to save you/me, just the furnace kicking on and the black sky out the window. When these come, I’ve been trying of late to not fall to despair but to sit with the sensation. This is harder than it sounds. Body chemical response saying one thing, mind meekly urging another. But I’ve made some progress. Eager to look back at posts like this say nearly 30 years from now and see how far I’ll have gone from this present moment. Or maybe I’ll have mastered the below, which I found here, an article about the uncertainty of aging. Meantime, I have some old photos and journals to occupy me while the clock ticks upstairs.