Things Were So Much Simpler Then. And Uglier. Probably.

Ah, nostalgia...how I long for you...sometimes.

Like whenever I try to remember what life was like when I was 6 and I realize I might as well try to reminisce about the Big Bang.

As much as I love to long for the far-from-perfect-but-certainly-less-complicated, artistically-vibrant world that I never experienced in the 1960s/70s, try as I might it is impossible for me to romanticize my actual past. Everything I remember about my childhood I only 'remember' because people have told me the same stories over and over and therefore they have stayed with me longer than the rest.

But these romanticized memories, from somebody else's perspective no less, are far from the truth. They are filtered, corrupted opinions; fiction masquerading as memories. Unless you are a snail or a hermit yet to murder his last brain cell with moonshine, life moves too fast to remember all the details.

It is as if I am a dependable machine stuck in 'Forward Mode', a young man eternally going West and failing to realize I have been treading over the same ground my entire life, unsure what exactly I am looking for and why I keep moving, unsure whether things are improving or getting worse, constantly reformulating theories about the world that become more depressing the more I learn about it and its inhabitants.

The curious, adventurous, social adult--the guy doing it right, I tell myself, all the while conflictingly aware that ignorance is bliss--leads a life replete with biases, uncertainty, and editing, whether he likes it or not. The relentless flow of new information into your brain not only needs to be easily sorted, but also inevitably results in the deletion of the oldest material in the storage bin, the information that doesn't matter because it isn't going to help you achieve your dreams, while the wisdom filling one of Carl Sagan's seminal tracts might help you understand things a bit better and smooth over those last few wrinkles impeding your impending success.

And then you realize you probably had all your best dreams when you were a child, all those dreams you have long-since forgotten, and a slow-burning panic sets in. Am I ruined? Does too much knowledge work against me? Have I paralyzed myself by learning too much about the world? Have I made things too complicated when simplicity is the answer? Has reality destroyed my dreams? Have I lost my unique identity somewhere along the road to wherever the hell I am right now? What am I chasing anyway?

Who knows. Knowledge? Adventure? True love? Happiness? All sound trite, but maybe triteness is closer to truth than we realize. Maybe we should grant it more respect.

All I know is I've been hard at work for twenty years, trying to get somewhere, making sure I enjoy the ride, never sure of where I'm heading or even where I've been once the initial afterglow of discovery wears off. Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing here? Is there a better way to go about all this?

So many questions, so few answers. Zero answers. Help!

Enter the Apple IIe, machine of the future, here in the now to solve as many problems as you can throw at it. 4 + 4? No problem. Starving to death on the Oregon Trail for lack of squirrel meat? Unsure whether or not reality is a dream or if the calories are worth it? Whatever your problem, rest assured the Apple IIe will solve it with only a few strokes of its custom-built keys.

I don't know about you, but I find that comforting. Hey, maybe that's what it's all about--comfort. We all know the answer, whatever it is, will be a simple one, so it might as well be the simplest.

Whatever you do as the merry-go-round of life spins its finite series of revolutions, just make sure you are comfortable doing it and you can be content that you are doing it right.

Huh. Too bad I'll forget all about this tomorrow...

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The Three-Fingered Woman

When I was a little(r) boy, I only had three nightmares that I can remember, but they were all recurring and fierce.

One was that I was suspended in the corner of my bedroom, up near the ceiling, inexplicably moving outward as if attached to a rocket bound for outer space. I would wake up in a sweat, repeating the words "It's so far away!" until my mom got me to stop by knocking me unconscious with a miniature baseball bat stored on my bedside table for that precise purpose.

Another was that I would be forced to play Monopoly every second for the rest of my life, which just sounds like the worst thing ever. Should we use this on terrorists, or is it worse than waterboarding? Somebody read this for me and let me know--I need to go feed my gerbils.

Anyway, the third nightmare involved a three-fingered woman. This woman didn't really do anything other than exist, but that was enough for me. Something about an elderly woman missing two fingers was enough to make me scream in my bed "The three-fingered woman!" until my mom pulled out that bat again.

I have no real explanation for the first two, but the genesis of this last, rather odd nightmare was the movie Cloak and Dagger (1984), which is about a boy, Davey (E.T.'s adorable Henry Thomas), who spends a lot of time playing video games and living in a fantasy world of spies and high-stakes intrigue, accompanied by his cavalier imaginary hero, Jack Flack (Dabney Coleman). He lives in a fantasy world because his mom is dead and his father (Dabney Coleman) is a pilot who is never around. One day, a dying man gives Davey a Cloak and Dagger video game cartridge and he suddenly finds himself the target of real-life spies with real guns.

The plot, in pictures (thanks, Internet!):

Davey plays with action figures in his room, alone as usual

 "What's this? Why did a dying man give me this game?" -Davey

 "When I beat all the levels, cuz I'm a nerd, I find secret military documents." -Nerd

Dads never understand children

"Your Dad doesn't believe you, but I do--we gotta save the world!" -Jack Flack

"Wait--I AM your Dad and I just saved the world! He has been your hero all along."

Awwwwwwwwww...

At some point in the middle there, Davey is warned to be on the lookout for a spy who is missing two fingers. When he gets to the Alamo (what is it about the Alamo that made it so popular in the Eighties?) for a hand-off, things don't exactly go as planned and the three-fingered woman rears her ugly...hand...



That isn't exactly as I remember it--I thought the ole bag wore a tailor-made three-fingered black leather glove--but, regardless, you can see why this would scare a little boy every time he saw it (I watched the movie multiple times, against the wishes of my mother I'm sure).

I guess when you live in fear of something for as long as I did, your mind tends to get a bit creative with the details. Anyway, I'm proud to say I haven't had this nightmare in many days and I am damn proud of myself.


Dessert:

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Vintage Prom Photo

Isn't that just adorable? A poor man's Steve Jobs got to take Alice in Wonderland to his senior prom. When you think about what they probably look like now, it seems criminal. Thank you, Father Time!

"You're welcome!"

These two freshly-scrubbed kids seem a bit young to be wearing these kinds of clothes, but when you look at their faces for long enough (no less than fourteen hours), they seem totally comfortable in them, as if they were born to be adults. It's impressive.

This couple looks right out of Saturday Night Fever and I love it--despite the fact that it's tinged with sadness, as her corsage is an embarrassment and that always ruins a night on the town.

These next two nightowls have got to be from the South and, with that in mind, this photo is not only inadvertently hilarious but also could have been taken anywhere from 1950-2010.

But this is by far the most surprising thing I saw on my recent tour of the internet:

Fourteen results? That just doesn't seem right.

Hopefully, I've been able to change things with this missive, get things back on the right track--to right what once went wrong, you might say. I'll have to try it again and see what happens.


DEVELOPING...

Update:

More. In less time. It worked; I don't know how, but it worked...

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Thought of the Day:

You know things are bad when your dreams about time machines focus only on the past.

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