~a column by Colleen O’Brien
“Cultural backtracking” is simply nostalgia at work: longing for the past, living in the past, aggrandizing the past. We’re surrounded by it, involved in it, sold it by movies and Amazon.
And it comes on faster the older we get.
When times move too fast – as in life today – it’s easy to long for the past and what we make of it. Because memory is unreliable, we are at ease with embellishing our youth – high school drama, college wildness, first love. Forgetting the awkwardness of those days, I’d rather be there than here. The past in my memories is better than the present partly because it is and partly because I can make it so in my colander-like brain.
When I can’t figure out how to get a photograph off my phone and onto my computer, I think of my first Brownie camera. It needed film I bought at the drugstore, used in the camera, took back to the drugstore, then picked up a few days later as black and white photos for my scrapbook. All the ads now say that whatever I need my computer to do, it will do; such an improvement on pen and paper, typewriter, word processor as well as much easier now than before, much easier than those Dark Ages without computer. And a bargain besides.
Age being the fly in the soup here, I disagree. I’m a part of the dinosaur population, GenD (as in dumb) to go along with you Gen Xers and Millennials. In my truth, nothing is easier, everything is more difficult, including verbiage. What is a server? Not someone who waits on my table.
I don’t get the language or can’t remember it because my retention for new meanings of ordinary words short circuits at will. I can’t remember how many times when I’ve struggled for hours figuring out basic maneuvering around a computer that I’ve finally unplugged it and eaten a pint of ice cream while thinking of the days I was a soda jerk. Horrible job with a crabby boss, but in my nostalgia-needy heart, I’d rather dwell on making endless root beer floats and smelling like sour milk than try to figure out how to use my computer that was sold to me as a necessary tool for the dizzying speed of this endless postmodern life.
Surely we’ve moved beyond postmodern (from about the end of WWII) and although we are sometimes called post-postmodern, I feel we weren’t in “post” very long and are now in what feels like future-mod to me, and it’s taking charge so violently fast that I don’t even see it.
Ageing in a fast-paced era is like being a teenager all the time – the feelings are vulnerability, stupidity and a self-image as too everything – too awkward, too dim. “Gimme the good old days,” screams my head as my tender little heart makes me cry with frustration, knowing it’s not my fault, it’s the industry’s – “Let’s make it so complicated, they’ll have to come for help.”
And in the meantime, I can be sold nostalgia – Rice Krispy Treats sold singly, pointy-toed high heels, the movie “Back to the Future,” endless reruns of “I Love Lucy,” “Gunsmoke,” ‘Mayberry RFD.”
As I wallow in my own nostalgia, vaguely recalled but industriously enhanced by my longing for slower, simpler times, I am comforted by my nostalgic metaphor for this image of me as little girl: I play beneath the boxelder trees while it’s raining, and I never get wet.
