Nostalgia Is a Drug
One of my favourite t-shirts has a collection of floppies on the front which spell out “NOSTALGIA IS A DRUG”, and I’ll be hecked if that ain’t the truth folks.
I’m in a bit of mental rut right now and have been for several months (I started writing this post in November last year, SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED). These situations of duress that my brain subjects itself to tends to me make so introspective it’s a wonder I don’t collapse into some sort of singularity on the spot. Introspection invevitably leads to memories and oh noes we’re in the Nostalgia Zone©. I’ll try to keep this cohesive, but… gestures vaguely.
The past is always easier to deal with than the now because it isn’t busy happening. It’s happened. We can endlessly sit and re-examine it through the murky, malleable sepia of recollection. Each moment in isolation, coddled away from context and the mundanity of every day life, y’know, all the boring bits you never remember. So we’re left with a collection of memories which we (and I’m hoping we otherwise I have yet another set of brainworms) slowly pick over like the bones in an elephant graveyard.
One of the things contributing to my mental rut: I’ve been somewhat dismayed for a few years now at the growing lack of satisfaction I take in video games despite the undoubted formative effects they had during my youth. I wouldn’t call myself a gamer now, and I wasn’t a gamer then (inasmuch as that term didn’t exist back then with the connotations it has now). I was/am a Nerd™. How did I become one though?
Unbidden from the murky depths of my memory a recollection surfaced of one of the first games I cohesively remember. There is a FROG, and he is building a log cabin. Maths is involved. I’m playing on a Laptop which has a trackball. I’m in a log cabin on a family holiday. I’m on top of bunk bed. Did I perhaps conflate the log cabin we stayed in with the video game?
Every few years I would Google this loose collection of symptoms fragments to no avail, but a few months ago it seems despite apparent search rot, I stumbled upon an answer: Fun School 4 for 5 to 7 Year Olds.
Playing this again has been a strange experience. I would not consider it a particularly impactful game, and to contemporary users it is downright primitive. The recollections I have are so vague that the fuzzy feelings of Nostalgia are fleeting, almost confusing. The strings of my subconscious are tugged but there aren’t enough memories left to activate, only that one moment on the bed in the cabin. In the dark night while I type this I feel a tight ache in my chest at the void of memories. I often have difficulty remembering events and people from my youth all the way through high school and even undergrad, which is surprising considering my otherwise prodigious memory. It worries me often.
Recently while slogging through digitising family VHS-C tapes, I came across the holiday in question above. 15 minutes of grainy footage in 1997 of my sister and I feeding some monkeys and my dad paddling on Loskop Dam. My brother a fresh little baby in a walking ring. It’s funny watching an old video of yourself and you can scarcely remember the moment. Without fail in these videos we always wish to see more of the people. Places have meaning, but it’s the people that made them meaningful. The slow pans of empty landscapes feels infuriating, just turn around and look at the people I want to shout at the tape player.
That fleeting moment in the cabin I will cherish as long as I can.
As I alluded to earlier, this is the curse of nostalgia, the fleeting moment out of place and out of time. Impossible to recapture, because like time you yourself are constantly changing and moving forward. I cannot recapture the magical moment of simply installing Red Alert 2 on the family computer of my school friend and hearing the scenery chewing installer voiceover for the first time. The selfie I took on a cold snowy mountain at 13 with my first camera. The first time I managed to get a photo of the Pleiades after struggling with heaps of equipment in the early hours of the morning. The first time I finished Guards Guards by Terry Pratchett. The moment I nearly killed my new CPU overclocking at a LAN (Athlon 64 babbay!).
It is difficult to not get addicted to this drug. These memories, are for certain, magical and indulgent. Nothing, however, stops you from making new ones. Certainly there is pain in not generating joy from things you used to enjoy, but there is so much more to experience in the world if you allow it.
I have the great fortune of living in a beautiful part of the world, and I enjoy each and every sunrise and sunset. My young son is inquisitive and delightful in his discovery of the world, a simple joy I can share with him and my family. I finally got around to making my Nixie clock PCB and it worked first time without any bodges, but that is a story for another blog post.
I’m still in a bit of a mental low, but it feels better putting words to bytes. Join me next time for my blog post on neurodivergence, or DuckDB. It’s basically the same thing, right?