Wasting a few minutes of your life with my ramblings

In my very first post on my shiny new blog, I'll bring you up to date with the status of an ongoing practice of mine: living in the past.

Now I've been like this for many years. Ever since my adolescence I've believed that other time periods were all around better to live in than the present, whatever present that was at the time. In the early 1990s I always thought the 1950s was an ideal time of prosperity and simplicity. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s I was fascinated by the 1920s and 1930s. Everything from that era felt like it had more soul, substance, and character than the mass-produced, homogenized, plastic-fantastic crap that was creeping out of the soulless wasteland of our republic and into my hometown. I collected artifacts, recordings, images, and other ephemera from those days and surrounded myself with them. My wardrobe reflected typical garb of the time, giving me a closer connection and providing a tangible way of paying my respects to a world that survived only in scattered remnants and in the memories of a generation that was slowly fading away into history.

An unfortunate break with my practice of honoring the past through wardrobe choice occured in 2005. After losing a great deal of excess blubber, I could no longer wear most of my Depression-era fashions, and restocked my wardrobe with articles of a contemporary, mainstream appearance. Oh God, I even used hair gel. I also conducted an equally unfortunate experiment with a low-brow "redneck" fashion sense which I, and all of my friends, would like to forget. I now only wear those ridiculous Caterpillar work boots for performing strenuous labor, which isn't very often.

I'll flash forward to more recent times. Early this year I developed a nostalgia for a time period I actually lived through: the late 1990s-2000, approximately 1996-2000. Those years had a kind of grown-up innocence about them. It was a more restrained, mature form of the hedonism we'd seen in the consume-everything years of the 1980s. We goofed off at coffee shops, watched khaki-clad youths dance around in front of solid white backdrops on countless Gap commercials, tuned into alternative rock, watched Abercrombie & Fitch degenerate from a respectable outfitter into the favored clothier of the sex-obsessed, pickled-liver frat boy, enjoyed shows about nothing, waited for Pacy to nail his teacher, and reveled in the naughty peccadilloes of our commander-in-chief. I recall a line from a 1998 episode of the X-Files: "the world is at peace. There's a little trouble in the White House but that'll blow over, so to speak." The essence of the late '90s is kind of summed up right there in that obscure line of dialogue.

So what did this blog author do, once infected with this mania? For one thing, I re-created what my wallet would have looked like during this time. I dug around in my archives and found my first driver's license (the old laminated one), which expired in 2000. I also found my ancient laminated Blockbuster card, my first Visa check card, an old health insurance card, and an old AAA card. I even found my old college ID. I put all of these in the wallet I've used off and on since 1992. To complete the effect, I inserted old-style currency from historically accurate series dates. I still have most of my Abercrombie & Fitch plaid shirts that I wore all the time. I dug out my old Timberland boots and the LL Bean walking shoes I had in those days of yore, as well as the crowning glory, my old baseball caps. I have old photos to jog my foggy memory as to which caps I wore over the years.

Those who know me and see me regularly know that I don't don the '90s garb every single day. Maybe 2 or 3 days out of the week. Honestly, these days it's just too damned hot here in North Cackalacky for the decade-old flannels.

As a pleasant coincidence, my car dates from the late '90s. Now that the DMV is doing away with inspection stickers, I made a replica of a sticker from the late '90s. To make the interior feel a little more authentic, I put a few old CDs from that era in the console. I still have my old cell phone from those days, which I put on the dash. And of course I play music from the time as well, with such gems as Mambo No. 5, One Week, Pretty Fly For a White Guy, etc. Then there are days when I play Glycerine over & over. You see, the late '90s wasn't all sunshine and farts. It was also a time when my generation was left feeling a bit shaken and demoralized from having endured the lean times that followed the hedonistic decadence of the '80s, and reaching out for genuine verse that expressed our adolescent disillusionment with the world and stood apart from pop radio's daily serving of chum. I regret having tuned out of contemporary music to the extent that I did from about 1994-1997. I would pick up on some of the more popular stuff here and there if someone had a radio on in the car, but I totally missed the boat on all the alternative stuff that was coming out at the time, unless Everclear counts as alternative. Even if I were to explore '90s alternative music now, I wouldn't feel the same personal connection to it that my peers do who experienced it as an integral component of the '90s zeitgeist.

My parents' house is a mother lode of '90s artifacts. I'm the kind of person who throws away very little. My material possessions from a good 20 years of my life are boxed up and scattered about the house (my empire of dirt, as I call it). There's always a new discovery to be made by rooting around in all the nooks and crannies where I stashed stuff over the years. Clothes, videotapes, cassettes, photos, books, magazines, and other debris and detritus from 20 years of accumulating crap can be found in dusty boxes under beds and stuffed in closets. My latest find is my brother's Compaq desktop computer from 1996. I can remember dialing up AOL on that beast. I imagine it still works. I'm sure it runs Windows 95 and probably has the first incarnation of Napster.

While my personal life has seen great improvements over its status 10 years ago, the world in general has been completely shitty during this whole decade. The new millennium has not been kind to us. We were beset with two terms under one of our worst presidents and his regime of totalitarian cronies, a pointless "war on terror", an unending flood of idiotic reality TV shows, an economy and financial system that started out strong, fell apart, picked itself back up somewhat, and then turned to shit practically overnight, crippling fuel shortages, spiking food prices, and finally a new president who's basically Al Gore with big ears and a first lady with man-arms and no class. Of course, the first lady of the late '90s was a god-damned harpy and her husband a lecherous socialist sleaze, so maybe we'll call that a draw. Do you wonder, now, why I wish for a return to the prosperous stupor of the late '90s?

Until the next post, as my dear old high school history teacher always said, be careful out there, and don't get killed, because it's too much paperwork for me.