A lot of stuff happens. Stuff is happening all the time, it never seems to stop.
Twenty-seven isn't that old. So people keep reassuring me as I grind toward thirty like a belaboured flatbed truck weighed down with all sorts of scrap metal and rusty bent things. I suppose they're right, thirty isn't that old considering I'll live until about eighty or ninety odd, as long as I'm lucky and behave myself and don't insert anything into my head that shouldn't be there. Twenty-seven isn't even half way. Granted that a good five or ten of those years will be spent shuffling about stiffly, unsure of what's going on and secretly pissing myself in Marks & Spencer while I browse the cardigans, but I'll still be alive. If I'm lucky.
But at twenty-seven there's so much to remember. Lots of stuff. Everything that's happened in those twenty-seven years, all the significant events, along with a hell of a lot of insignificant ones, rattling around inside my brain, bouncing off chunks of dialogue from films and choruses from angsty nineties alt-rock songs. Major and minor life events, people I've known forever and people who I met for five minutes at a party occasionally reappear in there like a relative you hate at Christmas. It's overwhelming.
I can vividly remember watching Tim Burton's first Batman film with my dad in the late 80's at an age when I was barely aware that I was alive. The colour scheme of the house was lots of different shades of brown and we had A Plant that sat in one corner. The film was on VHS and at the time videos came in massive boxes. A big yellow box that had a massive space between where the video was held and the outside of the box itself, because it was the 80's and no one gave a shit about natural resources so they used as much plastic as they could. There was a quiz before the film started and if you knew the answer you could call a premium rate number and win an Amiga, which was obsolete the day it was released, with a copy of the Batman game.
And games! Being a dork a lot of my memories are tied up in video games. The dizzying experience of travelling all the way to the big city lights of Swansea to shop for Super Nintendo games in Toys 'R' Us where you had to pick a ticket and take it to a special counter. Behind the counter was the room wherein the games were kept under lock and key, more valuable than saffron. I even remember my dad arriving home with the Super Nintendo for the first time after he'd bought it for himself, his outdated moustache bristling with excitement. It came with Super Mario World and the first time I played it I was chewing banana flavoured bubblegum that tasted nauseatingly like medicine. I remember getting one of those awful third-party controllers with that had a slow-motion button that just paused the game repeatedly as you tried to play. Years later it was Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 that got me to finally watch a James Bond film (Goldeneye, funnily enough) after years of being adamant that I hated them, despite never seeing any. To be fair, I still hate most of them but about four are among my favourite films now.
Once again, thanks to my king nerd crown sitting at a jaunty angle on my oversized head, movies are of huge importance to my memories. My early teens were defined by watching cult classics like Blade Runner and Naked Lunch, or proper classics like The Exorcist and Apocalypse Now, and falling utterly in love with the medium. The opening shot of 2019 Los Angeles, with it's winking lights, flaming chimneys and flying cars set to the angelic synth score by Vangelis is so ingrained in my brain that it will probably be the last thing I think of before I die. I may even make Roy Batty's final speech my last words. I did all this film-watching as opposed to going outside and making friends.
I did finally make friends, though. When I was about fourteen, again - because of video games, I remember starting to actually speak to people because I realised they liked a lot of the things I did. I remember the buzz of being invited to parties, the excitement of being there, the gross, tangy taste of Woodpecker cider, the go-to drink of the underager. That smell of teenage sick - sour and aggressive - permeates the memories of a lot of these events like a reeking fog. One such event in particular, my own impromptu party at my house when I was 16. Only a few people were meant to come, but practically everyone I knew ended up there. Then two friends drank 90's worth of spirits between them and one fell arm-first through a glass partition and bled all over the bath while the other spewed chicken korma down the side of an armchair wearing my then-four-year-old sister's knickers over his jeans. The image of a pizza delivery man holding a stack of boxes for us as an injured teen was carried past him and out of the house on a stretcher by an ambulance crew will never leave me. Ah, nostalgia!
And that's just what the problem is. Nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a crippling disability. It can completely remove you from whatever situation you're in, much like a yawn, a stretch or an intense session of eye-rubbing. You'll be happily chatting away about the weather or the menopause or something when suddenly a smell or a sound will transport your brain back to 1993 and leave your body a hollowed out shell for your co-converser to yap at, completely unaware that you've now checked out to relive an episode of Fraggle Rock. It's almost impossible to recreate nostalgia artificially - if you specifically listen to an old song to indulge yourself in a trip down memory lane it's like trying to make a cat play fetch, but the same song will come on the radio in work or on shuffle on your iPod unexpectedly and that'll be the end of you. Openly weeping about your evaporated youth in front of the Co-Op listening to I Can See It in Your Eyes by Men at Work.
Why is this a problem? Because this happens to me now and I'm only ("only") twenty-seven. What the hell am I going to be like when I'm forty-seven, or sixty-seven? Don't get me wrong, I hope I live that long and then some, but I also hope I'm not so debilitated by my memories that I have to live on some kind of specifically invented life support machine for the wistfully disabled that drip feeds me liquefied nourishment while I daydream about Metal Gear Solid. I don't exactly want to live out Memento either, but I need to find a balance. One day I'll be looking back on my twenties the same way I look back on my childhood now. Why isn't anyone talking about how insane that is?! I've barely scratched the surface of even a fraction of my life in this post and it's exhausting to read already. I didn't even begin to talk about my discovery of all the terrible music I love, or all the friends who learnt to put up with me, how school scars everyone for life whether they're bullied or not, all the different houses and dirty flats I've lived in, the places I've worked and on and on seemingly forever. When people make fun of someone like Russell Brand for writing an autobiography at a fairly tender age I look at them totally non-plussed. What do you mean? He's a bit older than me and he's famous! Loads has happened to him!
And stuff just keeps happening. There's no way to really stop and take stock and let yourself catch up with life. It'll just barrel ahead like its break line has been cut. There is an upshot though - it's experience. The better you remember things the better you learn from them. Everything - a night out, a game of pool, a partner, a friend, a fling, a job, a phone call, a driving lesson - is woven into the tapestry that makes up your history, so don't shy away from a dose of nostalgia unless you're operating heavy machinery - you might learn something from all the stupid things you've done. Like how to do them again even more stupidly. In fact, there's a quote from Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men that's perfect for just this sentiment:
"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?
People always talk about having a "fresh start" or "reinventing" themselves, usually when they've done something really embarrassing they'd rather forget like farting with excitement when they met the Queen. But you never really can. Your life is basically all the stuff you've done, because you haven't done the stuff you're about to do yet. Just keep doing stuff, good and bad, and appreciate the fact that you can remember it most of it. It means you're still alive. And stuff.
Twenty-seven isn't that old. So people keep reassuring me as I grind toward thirty like a belaboured flatbed truck weighed down with all sorts of scrap metal and rusty bent things. I suppose they're right, thirty isn't that old considering I'll live until about eighty or ninety odd, as long as I'm lucky and behave myself and don't insert anything into my head that shouldn't be there. Twenty-seven isn't even half way. Granted that a good five or ten of those years will be spent shuffling about stiffly, unsure of what's going on and secretly pissing myself in Marks & Spencer while I browse the cardigans, but I'll still be alive. If I'm lucky.
But at twenty-seven there's so much to remember. Lots of stuff. Everything that's happened in those twenty-seven years, all the significant events, along with a hell of a lot of insignificant ones, rattling around inside my brain, bouncing off chunks of dialogue from films and choruses from angsty nineties alt-rock songs. Major and minor life events, people I've known forever and people who I met for five minutes at a party occasionally reappear in there like a relative you hate at Christmas. It's overwhelming.
I can vividly remember watching Tim Burton's first Batman film with my dad in the late 80's at an age when I was barely aware that I was alive. The colour scheme of the house was lots of different shades of brown and we had A Plant that sat in one corner. The film was on VHS and at the time videos came in massive boxes. A big yellow box that had a massive space between where the video was held and the outside of the box itself, because it was the 80's and no one gave a shit about natural resources so they used as much plastic as they could. There was a quiz before the film started and if you knew the answer you could call a premium rate number and win an Amiga, which was obsolete the day it was released, with a copy of the Batman game.
And games! Being a dork a lot of my memories are tied up in video games. The dizzying experience of travelling all the way to the big city lights of Swansea to shop for Super Nintendo games in Toys 'R' Us where you had to pick a ticket and take it to a special counter. Behind the counter was the room wherein the games were kept under lock and key, more valuable than saffron. I even remember my dad arriving home with the Super Nintendo for the first time after he'd bought it for himself, his outdated moustache bristling with excitement. It came with Super Mario World and the first time I played it I was chewing banana flavoured bubblegum that tasted nauseatingly like medicine. I remember getting one of those awful third-party controllers with that had a slow-motion button that just paused the game repeatedly as you tried to play. Years later it was Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 that got me to finally watch a James Bond film (Goldeneye, funnily enough) after years of being adamant that I hated them, despite never seeing any. To be fair, I still hate most of them but about four are among my favourite films now.
Once again, thanks to my king nerd crown sitting at a jaunty angle on my oversized head, movies are of huge importance to my memories. My early teens were defined by watching cult classics like Blade Runner and Naked Lunch, or proper classics like The Exorcist and Apocalypse Now, and falling utterly in love with the medium. The opening shot of 2019 Los Angeles, with it's winking lights, flaming chimneys and flying cars set to the angelic synth score by Vangelis is so ingrained in my brain that it will probably be the last thing I think of before I die. I may even make Roy Batty's final speech my last words. I did all this film-watching as opposed to going outside and making friends.
I did finally make friends, though. When I was about fourteen, again - because of video games, I remember starting to actually speak to people because I realised they liked a lot of the things I did. I remember the buzz of being invited to parties, the excitement of being there, the gross, tangy taste of Woodpecker cider, the go-to drink of the underager. That smell of teenage sick - sour and aggressive - permeates the memories of a lot of these events like a reeking fog. One such event in particular, my own impromptu party at my house when I was 16. Only a few people were meant to come, but practically everyone I knew ended up there. Then two friends drank 90's worth of spirits between them and one fell arm-first through a glass partition and bled all over the bath while the other spewed chicken korma down the side of an armchair wearing my then-four-year-old sister's knickers over his jeans. The image of a pizza delivery man holding a stack of boxes for us as an injured teen was carried past him and out of the house on a stretcher by an ambulance crew will never leave me. Ah, nostalgia!
And that's just what the problem is. Nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a crippling disability. It can completely remove you from whatever situation you're in, much like a yawn, a stretch or an intense session of eye-rubbing. You'll be happily chatting away about the weather or the menopause or something when suddenly a smell or a sound will transport your brain back to 1993 and leave your body a hollowed out shell for your co-converser to yap at, completely unaware that you've now checked out to relive an episode of Fraggle Rock. It's almost impossible to recreate nostalgia artificially - if you specifically listen to an old song to indulge yourself in a trip down memory lane it's like trying to make a cat play fetch, but the same song will come on the radio in work or on shuffle on your iPod unexpectedly and that'll be the end of you. Openly weeping about your evaporated youth in front of the Co-Op listening to I Can See It in Your Eyes by Men at Work.
Why is this a problem? Because this happens to me now and I'm only ("only") twenty-seven. What the hell am I going to be like when I'm forty-seven, or sixty-seven? Don't get me wrong, I hope I live that long and then some, but I also hope I'm not so debilitated by my memories that I have to live on some kind of specifically invented life support machine for the wistfully disabled that drip feeds me liquefied nourishment while I daydream about Metal Gear Solid. I don't exactly want to live out Memento either, but I need to find a balance. One day I'll be looking back on my twenties the same way I look back on my childhood now. Why isn't anyone talking about how insane that is?! I've barely scratched the surface of even a fraction of my life in this post and it's exhausting to read already. I didn't even begin to talk about my discovery of all the terrible music I love, or all the friends who learnt to put up with me, how school scars everyone for life whether they're bullied or not, all the different houses and dirty flats I've lived in, the places I've worked and on and on seemingly forever. When people make fun of someone like Russell Brand for writing an autobiography at a fairly tender age I look at them totally non-plussed. What do you mean? He's a bit older than me and he's famous! Loads has happened to him!
And stuff just keeps happening. There's no way to really stop and take stock and let yourself catch up with life. It'll just barrel ahead like its break line has been cut. There is an upshot though - it's experience. The better you remember things the better you learn from them. Everything - a night out, a game of pool, a partner, a friend, a fling, a job, a phone call, a driving lesson - is woven into the tapestry that makes up your history, so don't shy away from a dose of nostalgia unless you're operating heavy machinery - you might learn something from all the stupid things you've done. Like how to do them again even more stupidly. In fact, there's a quote from Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men that's perfect for just this sentiment:
"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?
People always talk about having a "fresh start" or "reinventing" themselves, usually when they've done something really embarrassing they'd rather forget like farting with excitement when they met the Queen. But you never really can. Your life is basically all the stuff you've done, because you haven't done the stuff you're about to do yet. Just keep doing stuff, good and bad, and appreciate the fact that you can remember it most of it. It means you're still alive. And stuff.