Why Do I Pine for the Bad Times?
I don’t think I’m doing this whole nostalgia thing the right way...
Welcome to Moronitude! My brain has recovered from last week’s crush at work. A crush that was 100 percent preventable and 99 percent attributable to the epic master class on procrastination I put on. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to hit deadlines. I simply don’t miss them. As I get older and I recognize the total wreckage each magazine closing makes of both my brain and body I can’t help but wonder if I should rethink my tactics. Maybe get some stuff done early. Then again, the system does still work. And change is bad…
Speaking of procrastination… have you been wandering on over to this newsletter through links I’ve posted, but you haven’t committed fully to receiving my ramblings sent directly to your electronic mail? Then do as I say, not as I do and mash that button down below.
Trigger Warning: I end up talking about the death of my mom quite a deal in this one.
This week I want to talk about nostalgia. More specifically, how I think I’m doing the whole nostalgia thing wrong.
It is my belief that there is always a hint of sadness with nostalgia. Even as you reminisce about the good ol days there is a part of your brain that can’t help but stick on the part that those times will never happen again. So while you’re having plenty of laughs about convincing your inebriated buddy that once he places a sleeping bag over his head he’ll become the Great Wazoono, you also remember that you’ll never be at another underage house party again. You’ve likely lost touch with some of those people if not all of them, some of them may have even passed away. You don’t focus on this part when you’re reminiscing—unless you’re a true psychopath—but the thought is there.
To me, this is the way nostalgia is supposed to work. And much of the time this is the way I process nostalgia. But then, sometimes, I do the weird thing I do.
I get really nostalgic about the worst times of my life. For some reason when I get reminded of some of these dark times my brain doesn’t do the smart thing and try to move on to the next thing. Instead it embraces the thought and forces me to not just dwell on it, but then I actually miss it. I get nostalgic for the pain and trauma.
I’ve written about this in here previously, but my mom died almost three years ago. She suffered a stroke at the end of May, then spent the next 34 (I think) days in the hospital fighting before passing away on July Fourth. I was unemployed at the time, so I was actually able to fly down to Florida and spend the month with her in the hospital.
It was, without question, the worst month of my life. Emotionally, the entire month felt as if I were in a vise. I was experiencing every single emotion under the sun and as I tried to deal with those, there was the ever tightening realization of how things were going to end. It was an awful time in my life.
Yet, every June I come across memories from that hellish month and I find myself getting nostalgic. I think back on those sleepless nights staring at a monitor, paying close attention to my mom’s heart rate, with something akin to nostalgia. I recall the way I memorized the daily menus at both of the hospital’s cafeterias wistfully. I almost miss my daily 5:30 am “wake up call” when the doctor would wheel in a portable X-ray machine and I would either have to walk out of the room or, preferably, have the lead blanket put over my very important reproductive parts so I could watch the action.
I think back on all of this three years later and I smile. The thoughts just pop into my head and I recall them warmly, getting the same serotonin rush I get when I remember being at Candlestick to see the A’s win the World Series or my first real kiss.
What is wrong with my brain that I look back on the darkest times fondly? That can’t be the way this whole thing is supposed to work, can it?
These days, what with the social media the kids keep yammering about occupying my empty moments, you’re never really finished with the past. Each day my feed lets me know what I was doing two years ago, five years ago, 12 years ago. This is the only thing I ever reliably check every single day. I’m curious what I was up to. Maybe I was at a great concert. Cool. Maybe I was drinking whiskey to excess with my dad in Chicago. Awesome.
I even get more of a thrill out of the completely mundane Facebook memories like this one from 11 years ago today: “Au Revoir, Les Bleus!” What the hell does that even mean? It becomes a puzzle where eventually I remember that France busted out of the 2010 World Cup after the home team (South Africa) beat them 2-1.
So this month I get inundated with all of these strange memories from three years ago. I wasn’t documenting my mom’s progress on social media beyond the occasional updates on her condition. I was posting weird pictures from around the hospital and oddball musings that came to me thanks to a month’s worth of stress-filled nights.
The historian in me wishes I wrote a lot more about what was happening as it was happening, keeping all of my thoughts clear so that when I looked back on the experience I would have a more trusted narrator than my memory. Instead what I got is a bizarre diary of how I tried to cope with a situation I couldn't have been any less prepared for.
I love this “diary.” It shows that I was trying to find nuggets of joy in my nightmare. With the benefit of hindsight, I think I was posting a lot of this stuff as a subtle way to let people know I was OK. I was saving my tears for the many, many phone calls I had with my friends and family, but when I got on Instagram or Facebook I just needed to show that my sense of humor was intact, even in dire circumstances. It was my version of the Stiff Upper Lip heralded by the British, except instead of being an act of great heroism against enormous odds I just took a bunch of bizarre photos and made jokes about them.
Here’s my post from 6/22/18: Garlic bread—the finest delicacy of Chinese buffets south of the Mason-Dixon.
This is true, by the way. Chinese buffet garlic bread is phenomenal. I grabbed it for the first time as a joke, so that when I showed back at the table with garlic bread my companions would make fun of me. But guess what? It was delicious. I have had garlic bread at no fewer than 8 different Chinese buffets and I would put those slices up against every single Italian eatery in the country.
Here’s a post from 6/18/18: I found my amphibian cousin. This frog likes to party, obviously.
There was a sitting area outside of the hospital where I would go most nights to give my girlfriend “the call.” I’d update her on my mom and just pour out all of the anxiety I had inside of me sitting on a bench across a little looking pond from this frog sculpture. My dad and I referred to our sojourns out here as “visiting the frog.” One day there was an empty Red Bull can sort of near the frog, so I threw my hat on him (making him very dapper), put the can in his hand and boom. Social media gold.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out that the bench the frog is sitting on was a sort of Lover’s Lane for lizards. Every night they would congregate there and it got wild. So. Much. Lizard. Sex.
Here’s another example, this one is from 6/7/18: This hospital cafeteria is by far the least festive place I’ve ever eaten a corn dog.
I made this post at the tail end of our first week in the hospital. This was my first post other than passing on information, my first attempt at getting a smile while mired in a fucked up situation. It also happened to be a damn fine corn dog that sparked a fire inside of me.
There were corn dogs in the cafeteria every day, but this is the only one I would have. I was holding out. What I wrote in that post lingered with me in the days to come: “the least festive place I’ve ever eaten a corn dog.” I wanted to have another corn dog in the same cafeteria, in the same seat, but to have it be the most festive corn dog I’ve ever eaten. In other words, I was holding out until my mom was released from the hospital. Then, as we were waiting at the pick up for the car to come around, I’d grab a celebratory corn dog.
That day never came, but when I see that post I don’t dwell on the fact that I was denied the celebratory corn dog. I think about the hope inside of me at the moment that I decided there was a celebratory corn dog to look forward to. I think about all the silly things I did to keep my mind occupied—watching every single World Cup game, updating my mom on every detail about the Red Sox, reading Mike Royko’s book about Mayor Daley, planning when I would go on my walkabouts. Most of all, I think about the way I attempted to radiate positive energy the entire time I was in that hospital, making sure my mom was surrounded by love and nothing else.
It’s easy to remember this as a terrible time and a sad time, because it obviously was, but I was also finding out some things about myself. I wasn’t just finding a way to function through the moment, I was finding little moments that built up our spirits. For 37 years I was convinced that this inevitable event would completely destroy me, but here I was proving that I was stronger than that, that I’d push through intact. I was losing my mom but everything she taught me was still inside, and as long as it was there, I was going to be fine.
And there’s the answer. I’m not nostalgic for the bad times, I’m appreciative of what those times taught me about myself. That’s not my brain misunderstanding nostalgia, it’s my brain reminding me that I may be a weirdo obsessed with Italian delicacies at Chinese buffets, but I’m a resilient weirdo, and that’s the sort of information worth dwelling on.
This has been Moronitude. This one went places I hadn’t intended, but I’m glad we went there. I normally try to not get overly personal and I envisioned this as being more vaguely about how I view nostalgia, but the brain had other plans. Such is life. See ya next week.