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You've heard the usual sob stories
recounted endlessly in increasingly public fashion. each one comes on weepier and more uncomfortable than the last. long ago you lost count of the amount of tearful testimonies you've witnessed. by now you've started to feel progressively more alarmed by how the relatively simple memories shared in these stories seem to overtake virtually anything else out there in the world in their passion and fervor.
and yet you could not know that, later in your life, these sorts of stories would be repeatedly invoked by you too as a pivotal moment in your life. or that the feelings brought up by these memories would rarely fail to make even the most hardened of grown men, steeped in the many long days and nights of their brutal everyday work grind, start welling up wistfully in solidarity. even the most grizzled among us can agree: these times, they were so significant, so consequential. they simply cannot be matched.
without even really knowing it, you yourself have spent your entire life silently training to be ready to conjure
up story after story of past wistful yearning as well. maybe you won't need them, but: remember that you can drop these tearful treasured memories
like a bomb on others the second anyone doubts for a single second that
you are, or at least were, passionate. you could even bring them up if you ever run for public office and your authenticity is ever
called into question. this path is a crucial part of you - it's your birthright. you've continually demonstrated that you’re a good, normal, media-consuming
individual from birth - no one
can question that. it’s important to think about that. don't let others dilute your mindset.
and yet your rapidly growing confidence somehow doesn't push away the also rapidly growing dread you feel that these stories have started sounding indistinguishable from each other in
their millionth retelling. you wonder, in the back of your mind, if all the trips you've taken to the memory office inside your head haven't left your inner world increasingly stripped of any kind of imagination. sometimes you worry that you have no real distance. can you ever grow past these stories? do others want you to grow past these stories? hasn't the strange ritual of sharing them simply begun to make less sense every time you
do it? isn't it all just scattered jigsaw pieces of aimless cultural waste, invoked by you in an increasingly disjointed manner? are we all just performing this elaborate, impassioned ceremony in an attempt to prove to ourselves, or to others... are these memories actually real at all?
the life of sharing these stories sends you hurtling through the endless tunnels and neural pathways of the collective consciousness. you're now on a perilous journey into the elaborate puzzle worlds of others' minds - always searching for a kind of treasure that may or may not have ever really existed. these memories are like the Green Hill Zone of life - they're Level One, full of shimmering fields of possibility... before it all really started happening. before we lost ourselves somewhere out there in the bigger, meaner, more confusing world.
but also: somewhere out there is a new 'natural' world, one made to compensate for all the
vanishing possibility and diminishing sense of mystery in the real one. and somewhere in this new natural world you can actually find a real
heaven, a real floating city, a real mysterious gold
palace, a real sexy neon futurescape, a real life on Mars. a real sun-soaked land with
waterfalls and canyons and birds singing.
anything and everything you've dreamed of is there. and we all can experience it - we can really have it all... through media.
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| CRT monitor photo of lost Sonic 2 concept art from Frank Cifaldi https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1734802109516886056 |
and so, in one of these many childhood memories you've ritualistically shared too many times to count now, a young version of you is
over as at your best friend's house. this could be one of many friends.
but, in this case, it is your friend whose family had way more money
than yours. this friend's parents also didn't appear to care to watch
their kids very much, for reasons you did not understand. you seem to
recall that a few years later, this friend maybe moved out of town, or
maybe decided you were too much of a loser to be friends with anymore.
maybe you didn't really have much in common with each other to begin
with. maybe you were never really friends at all?
the details are unimportant. on this evening, you both sit inhaling some cans of Sprite and half-watching cartoons that ambiently hum at a low volume in the background on a TV in your friend's family's living room. suddenly, you both make the very consequential decision to stay up all night playing some videogames. tonight it's gonna be just you and your friend (who you're pretty sure was definitely your friend), all night, alone. it's time to sit up with your faces pressed perilously close to the screen. everyone else is gone, for some reason: it doesn't matter why. that is outside the bounds of this particular story. it's time for both of you slam your fingers onto small plastic buttons in order to shuffle your little pixelated guys around in those wonderful virtual worlds.
in the midst of sharing your story, you seem to recall that this memory looked a lot like those kitschy
Thomas Kinkade style tableaus of consumer childhood nostalgia done by
artist Rachid Lotf. yes, these memories bring up confusing emotions that are hard to put in a particular
place or give a particular name to - but these pieces seem pretty close! suddenly you've hit all of the markers of a bygone era that you haven't seen for a long time, and you're flooded with old feelings. once you learn how to channel these feelings, others will materialize to show you their love for what you've done. soon enough, they too will begin to share their own stories.
but, as it turns out, this is all really an elaborate political performance. any sense of memory displacement you experience invariably gets gobbled up and puked out by many esteemed cultural commentators out there. these guardians of the thought realm want to assure you that, regardless of how you might feel, there are powers that be who want to take all these precious moments away from you. posts like the screencaps above and below from twitter account "Wokal Distance" are there to urgently remind you any time you unearth long-dead feelings that you can't really put into words, that what you really feel is the ache of the call home. you feel Pokémon cards, and mom's spaghetti. seeing these makes you feel the late 1990's consumer culture iteration of paintings of the British countryside. but here's the problem: the powers that be don't want kids of today to experience what you experienced. they want to piss all over your memories, and the memories of future generations. and they're doing it every day, in broad daylight. they're pissing in broad daylight, and no one cares! it's actually fucked up.
and so: how to fight back? good question. the time is well upon us now to reassert that we are vigilant consumers. we must violently grapple (for there is simply no other option at this late stage) with the ongoing efforts to exterminate traditional values, whatever those may be at the current moment. we must remember to be guided by the glowing light of these precious memories. our brothers in battle may be marble statue avatar accounts on social media. or they may be failed actors who grew a sizeable online audience by antagonizing blue-haired college students on behalf of good media-consuming people like you, in an act of great self-sacrifice. maybe they're anonymous folks with avatars of characters from some Japanese anime who seem to frequently share vaguely racist images that feature somewhat incoherent elaborate taxonomies of different types of human beings that you don't really understand. maybe we're all strange bedfellows here, but that's what makes it exciting! a brand new universe has opened up to you, and a whole new lexicon of ideas is now there for you to experience and study.
and now that you have entered into this world, it is time for you to know the true nature of your mission: you must start by extolling the dangers of modern architecture. they have corrupted the beauty of traditional Western values (represented by ornate details and columns on buildings) into the meaningless
decadence of the modern world. it
was good enough for past civilizations, so why isn't it good enough
for us? it's the question that has haunted many generations. and you must fight to achieve
a total victory here. you must do this to show your appreciation to those failed actors and obsessive anime avatar souls who sacrificed so much for you.
and that's invariably where the fixation with nostalgia and returning to some kind of lost past that may or may not have ever existed ends up. any given dive into childhood memories of playing videogames with your friend gets used to fuel right-wing RETVRN-style fantasies on the hyper-politicized internet of today. our memories are all just raw fuel used to send people down one kind of radicalization pipeline or another - leaving broken lives and families in its wake. there's always a Thomas Kinkade-style mind palace somewhere that should be forever fought for and upheld, and there's always a scapegoat to blame for the current rot in society. and it will always leave many more victims in its wake. even when the picture of this memory, the one manifested into a fever dreamy fantasia of consumerist signifiers, probably didn't even really happen.
where did it all go wrong? those garishly hyper-real re-digested versions of TV or
magazine ads of the time are rarely what anyone actually experienced: they're what you hoped you could have had back then. maybe that's the
point of their existence to begin with, and maybe that's not so harmful in some ways.
because so much culture is so ephemeral, it can be very valuable to further reflect on what's been left behind. from the 17th to 19th century, nostalgia was originally considered a medical sickness so severe that, if left untreated, could lead to death. this was particularly pronounced in the case of soldiers who experienced homesickness serving terms of duty far away from home: the only known cure was to return home. the meaning of the word "nostalgia" eventually changed in the 20th century to mean what it does today: a strong emotional experience of sentimentality. but perhaps something of these homesick afflictions still come out when we observe the victims of today's culture. images you haven't seen in a long time that might conjure up long repressed memories of what was forgotten in your life. the pace of culture moves faster than ever, and it leaves so much waste behind it. perhaps trying to resolve these feelings on a deeper level is essential to help you function and offer a clearer path forward into the future.
and also: you should know, at some level, that the real picture never feels like an ad you'd see somewhere. the real picture is always so much more complex and so context-specific. the true nature of these memories is often elusive and ambiguous. you can't really summarize it in a way that doesn't lead the to you talking about the circumstances of your life in general. and you should know that. you have to know that. right?
and yet, shockingly little of substance ever seems to worm its way out from the sharing of such anecdotes. because, in the social sphere, they're memories that can be shaped into anything you want to shape them into, and used for any sort of purposes you'd like to use them for. they could be the right-wing mass culture war campaign grievance of the hour, or they could look like the consoomer meme, or they could come from ultra-woke fanfic authors and primp Disney adults. so these memories get metabolized by mass media industries into another corny cultural cliché. any horizons beyond the blanket fortresses you created from consuming a trash heap of media inside your giant suburban castle fades into the background. all major sides are invariably fighting for slightly different variations on the same formula. the thought of joining a community not built entirely on unquestioned brand loyalty presented in slightly varying flavors never even enters the picture. it's about stamping your ticket into a theme park of increasingly nonsensical cultural sludge. and it's all reinforced by the culture of the internet, where we can celebrate as some kind of victory for the masses. it's epic bacon all the way down, folks. we all win, even when we're losing!
