It’s a turn-off to “live in the past”. It’s a cultural demon, established as far
back as the 1950s, in those compelling Shirley Booth characterizations in Come
Back Little Sheba, and Hot Spell, For a
positive and healthy existence, we’re not supposed to languish in our childhood
recollections and selective memories, but rather accelerate forward at jet
speed, fixated upon our future’s advancement, be it our childrens’ achievements,
our own, our professional or material gains, and our ever-empowering self-image
as a product of it all. No lifestyle article
on any web service homepage will ever espouse anything to the contrary.
What they will alternately offer is
some eight-box article on how to relieve the immediate stress and anxiety of
today’s world that plagues each and every one of us in some way, and a reminder
on how to breathe, how to stop cold and think before even thinking further,
step out for a walk, hum a tune, or do most harmlessly whatever the hell you
can to break the dark torpedoes veering down suddenly on your brain.
It's sure nice to see those little features,
which if nothing else remind us just how plagued we all really are anxiety-wise
today. It’s easy to forget. All I know
is, when I was a boy of seven, a half-century ago, there really weren’t
articles like this jumping out at you all over the place. Lifestyle magazines, bought and read strictly
by housewives would roll out a column now and then. Men had no emotions, and there was no internet
or moving screens in your face as you crossed the boulevard. There was also no 9-11 or COVID shutdown to
recover from.
In 1974 however, there were the remains
of the Vietnam War, city crime, pollution, and a deadly inflation that no one
was willing to admit was just as bad as what their parents dealt with in 1934. Denial went a long way back then, and things
like “family groups”, where folks unite to talk openly about their emotional
struggles were a much more covert operation in the pre-Self Help days, before
it became a full-on cottage industry.
The common consensus now, after a
world of misguided quarantines, market crashes, unprecedented anxiety over “retirement”
amongst a generation mostly convinced that their elderhood will consist of
paycheck employment until the hereafter, is that anything you can add to your
daily life to relieve that tension, if it’s safe, harmless and risk-free, is
healthy and worth it.
I’m not the only one to have landed
upon his or her Utopia.
More and more, the artifacts of a
distant past are surfacing. Our vital
cyber-friend YouTube is hills alive with the work of a population of history-dedicated
uploaders, benevolent with their time and effort, to restore the television and
radio obscurities in full-form to our availability. Only in recent years has this harvest come to
fruition, and for some of us, it’s just the wallpaper our inner sanctums call
for. An anti-inflammatory treatment for the
alienation of an indifferent, colorless, flavorless world a Generation X-er can’t
quite taste.
Any world is an acquired taste. I had just about zero tastes for the worlds I
lived in during the 1970s and 80s. I was
busy being a scorned, alienated fat kid with no friends, angry teachers, and
really couldn’t drudge up too much respect for the likes of Shaun Cassidy and
Olivia-Newton John at the time. I
laughed smugly at the 1980s when I lived in them adolescently. It was my only recourse.
Where does one look back to for
solace in the 2020s..? Likely to a world
that finally few any younger can respect.
Having lived in those times myself, I certainly can’t blame them. That doesn’t stop my vicarious crusade.
It’s a crusade only I or someone
with a compass similar to mine will understand, and I make no effort to defend
or explain. But an hour or so each day (if
I’m lucky enough to have the time) with a full-length radio or TV-news program
aircheck, sound siphoned through the “aux” of my exquisitely placed twin Crosley
“Ranchero” reproductions in a classic mid-century flat, suddenly rendering my
abode into a virtual “holodeck”, chiming the beautiful FM sounds of waiting
rooms in 1974, complete with aspirin commercials, is a stunning relief to any
current day emotional inflammation.
What’s the charm to this..? Perhaps the desire to step aboard a virtual
Circle Line cruise to a time when my elders were my age, much less healthier,
and much more accomplished, and stronger, for all their ailments, puts me in
that brief experience of being the grownup in a world that weathered much tougher
times. Amongst the people who saw hurt,
tragedy, loss, family drama, divorce, addiction and the requisite car wreck. I won’t be as strong or courageous as they
were. I won’t be commanding all that
they once farmed. But I can visit that world,
and remind myself of the terrain these people once crossed when I was too young
to know better.
Part of the catharsis of such indulgement
comes from knowing how it all turned out.
Bad times, good times……you’re still here. You’ve made it. Your higher power saw you through to this
safe place now. It’s a somewhat guilty
pleasure to revel in one’s survival success by taking the time to appreciate
those moments in past history that you never properly could. Maybe, good or bad to come, you’ll make it
through the next frontier. Just the way
our predecessors who never got to see the millennium did. It’s kind of a learning component. A step ladder that gets us to the next shelf
in this world just a little more safely.
The young are thankfully too
absorbed with the world in front of them, the way us X’ers were. Those beyond my years have no taste for that
elusive past. But as I define it, it’s
merely a tool to see one comfortably through these ambivalent and sometimes
frightening days. I recently watched a
1975 Johnny Carson show, where guest Rex Reed notes that the best thing you can
do in this world is to survive it.
At midnight, that’s exactly what I was
very gratefully doing.
Noah F.
