Sweet Nostalgia

I yearn for a simpler time.  Get off my lawn!

About a month ago now my friend Juan wrote a post about nostalgia.  I've been wanting to respond to his post for a while now, but it was a topic I wanted to sit and mull over before I wrote about it.  You see, out of seemingly nowhere nostalgia has become the dominant emotion of the past year of my life.  Shit that I haven't thought about in years, like the Tony Hawk games or the Pokemon anime circa the early 2000's, has suddenly become of utmost importance to me.  Over the summer I'd indulge my nostalgic tendencies, spending long nights revisiting everything from my youth that was even remotely worth a second look.  The Internet makes it easy to find artifacts from the past.  I'm not going to lie, there were some empty summer nights that I wasted away gorging my senses on random Youtube  videos that had no value outside the sentimental.  Youtube totally has the nostalgia market covered.  Clips of old TV shows, movie trailers, video game footage, retro commercials, and seemingly every pop song ever recorded are all online and easily retrievable.  Making all that nostalgic crap available to Internet-surfing nerds is a cool and admirable thing, but isn't also a tad irresponsible?  Like a kid in a candy store, it can sometimes be hard for me to peel myself away from the Internet and avoid OD'ing on candy-coated retro pop goodness.  Too much of a good thing?  Sometimes.

Screenshot of Mr. Mosquito, a favored video game from my youth

As long as such nostalgia binges don't overtake my existence and completely stall my intellectual growth though, I'm fine with indulging once in a while.  Most definitions of the world nostalgia involve the word "longing".  And it's true that sometimes that desire to revisit that past can be strong, all-consuming and borderline painful.  I will never be able to revisit the past or entirely satiate that hunger to relive moments of my life.  What I'm trying to say is this: there can be a sharp bitterness to nostalgia that's hard to ignore.  But on the flip side of that I also find that there's a sweetness to the emotion.  Sure I'll never be able to relive my life, but sometimes it's precisely the unattainability of the past that makes it so desirable.  Also, because I can't go back and relive past moments in the flesh, I can continually tell myself tales about how great the past was without coming up against any hard evidence to the contrary.  But perhaps the sweetest part about feeling nostalgia is that it indicates that you've built a past worth feeling nostalgic about.  As Juan put it in his article, "I think the thing about nostalgia which I like so much is that demonstrates to me that I had so much fun at many times in my older years."  Amen, Mr. Lobo.

And like Juan, I too find that I sometimes feel a nostalgic longing for things I never personally experienced in my lifetime.  Sometimes I feel as though I've "borrowed" the nostalgia other people feel for, say, 1980's pop music or 1950's style a la American Graffiti.  Sure I didn't grow up in these decades, but after a lifetime of consuming other people's memories via film, music, and fashion, some of my elders' nostalgic feelings naturally rubbed off on me.  Now, obviously I'm not nostalgic for the real 1980's or the real 1950's, but rather the decades as they've been represented to me by movies and other forms of pop culture.  This is an small but important distinction to make.  Being that I didn't live through these times, I can't really say what my true feelings would have been on them, but that doesn't mean that I don't have strong feelings for some of these decades nonetheless.  Some particular exports from certain decades (ex-1950's monster movies, 1970's zombie movies, 1980's video games, etc.)  hold a nostalgic appeal to me, even if I didn't experience them the first time around.  Now let me be clear, the appeal of most of these cultural artifacts doesn't lie solely in their nostalgic qualities, but I'd be lying if I said that the retro factor wasn't a substantial part of their draw.

Juan, in his post, stated that "pop culture is what gives these memories significance or paints the palette of their context to me."  I couldn't agree with this sentiment more.  Seemingly everything I feel about nostalgia seems to come from pop culture in one way or another.  Whether we're talking about movies or music giving me a context for bygone eras (see the previous paragraph) or me having nostalgia for moments in my own life relating to the media I consumed in the past, pop culture seems to be the metaphorical sun that my nostalgia revolves around. 

In case you couldn't already tell, a lot of what I endeavor to write about on this blog stems from my feelings about nostalgia and pop culture.  I didn't necessarily set out to write this blog with that goal in mind, but looking back on the posts I wrote over the past few months a pattern of nostalgia is fairly apparent.  Don't get me wrong Zombie Baby's not a nostalgia blog, I just like to indulge in the emotion fairly often.