Think Big, Young World
Slick Rick—Hey Young World (1988/ Real Rap Music)
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re listening and learning with The Ruler.
It didn’t work.
I was supposed to run the dishwasher when I went to sleep last night. I was reading about memory at midlife; more specifically the difference between fluid and crystallized memory, and how fluid memory—what we lean on when we learn new skills, facts and ideas—wanes as we get older. I was reading about memory techniques and thinking about how I once charmed my way into a crushing heartbreak when a young woman introduced herself to me at a party and I told her we had to repeat each other’s names three times out loud so that we wouldn’t forget, when I was reminded that the dishwasher needed to be run. So I said out loud: “Turn the dishwasher on before going to bed”. Said it three times.
That young woman has probably forgotten when we met. I have forgotten to turn on the dishwasher.
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This past weekend, I went to have lunch with a friend. He was in town for work. I asked him to pick the restaurant since he had lived here more recently and for longer than I have since I’ve sort of moved back. We ended up exactly where I would’ve suggested but didn’t, for concern of sounding like I wasn’t adventurous. The place is a staple, and everyone I know from a life in and out of this city has been eating there since the 90s. Then we went and grabbed a beer. At another spot we’ve been going to since the 90s. Everyone at the pub looked like they have been going there since the 90s as well. Or even longer.
I’m not into nostalgia traps but I seem to fall into them, bittersweet head over worn-out heels. Returning to the city I grew up in, pondering midlife, how I ended up back here and all the many fires still smoldering in my rear view mirror. Jobs, relationships, opportunities…there’s a quiet and still anger that sits inside me, like a rock in a birdcage. It doesn’t grow but it also doesn’t take up much space.
Nostalgia is an awful delusion. Looking around to see how it is used like a velvet cloak, wrapping up scared people to think and say and do awful things because the ground has gone muddy beneath their feet and the future looks too impenetrable. They drive backwards, Walter Benjamin’s angel of history in a leased SUV, because no one owns anything any more: this new future of life on loan, subscription as service. It’s easy to see why we might allow the blob of nostalgia to ooze over us and feed off our blood and dreams and grow and grow and grow until it has sucked everything into its miasma of a reality that never was.
I’m no Springsteen fan (I mean, I like the guy but I’m not trying to talk to anyone about Nebraska or anything) but he nailed it with ‘Glory Days’. And I guess that’s why there’s a bedrock of horror and sci-fi rooted in nostalgia gone awry.
Maybe that’s what midlife is about—understanding your relationship not to your past or your future, but wrestling with the formless—seeing the velvet cloak as a mere wet blanket.
I’m keeping the title of the book to myself, it’s really not that important (no offense to the author).
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