As Good As They Seem?
At my age, nostalgia is stupid. It is stupid because it mainly revolves around little nuggets of pop culture that we happen to stumble upon when a particular archive in the back of our minds is unlocked by too much beer or a clever reference in a Family Guy episode. There is no overarching importance attached to remembering Punky Brewster. Having a similarly aged friend spit out half a pint in an attempt to exuberantly exclaim that she remembers that too is good for a quick laugh and mop up by the waitress and nothing more. This past week however, I bucked this idea. I took it to the rim like Jake Voskuhl.
The decade between when I first developed a steady presence of armpit hair and now, when I often look at that hair and ponder the unattractiveness of its overly bushy properties has seen a lot of change in more important areas than pube growth. I could easily make an argument for these past ten years as being the most shockingly chalked full of drastic changes I will ever experience. I could also listen to the voice of the old bearded man and bring to light the whole notion that I have yet to actually experience more than 2.5 total decades. Screw him and his beard. I’m right. How can you argue against the period in your life where you learn not to barf after five beers? When you learn how to have sex for more than two minutes? When you realize that you have to wear big boy pants everyday? When you first look at yourself and see the cold hand of time under eyes, in your ever increasing forehead and in the hair between your nipples? These transformations are jarring enough to make you believe that Carlsberg has sponsored the end of them because everyone needs to get totally beer blitzed after going through all that shit. Thankfully, I haven’t been alone during this tumultuous tide of change. I’ve had Hayden and friends to watch Hayden with.
Due to my proper choices to stay way from hallucinogenic drugs, flashbacks are a rare treat of the mind. I’m usually whisked into the creaky vaults of my memory upon a particular sight that so specifically reminds me of moments past that I am forced to ponder the importance of remembering said piece of history. In this particular case, I was 14 (or maybe 15 – my flashbacks aren’t always filled with easily identifiable empirical data as I didn’t remember seeing a button on the younger version of myself that read: I am 14 Years Old).
I sat on the floor in the small, dingy and so quintessentially indie Oshawa hot spot, the Eclipse, emblazoned with an Archers of Loaf t-shirt and disgustingly dirty Doc Martens. Beside me was a good friend who matched me not only in intense fervor for underground music but in poorly chosen thrift store clothing and awkward teenage uncertainty. The two of us were surrounded by at best 48 other kids and strange lurking adults. Enthralled, we watched a younger, shorner and more like a Schneider’s Red Hot in the grocery store (raw and actually not that bad to eat if you’re starving and on drugs but you know it could be better if it weren’t so uncooked and was covered in Our Compliments prepared yellow mustard) version of Hayden run through some songs off his 7 Inches and upcoming debut release. It was teenageindierific. We both returned to our parents’ homes and went back to being High School students and dealing with the whole issue of wanting really bad to touch a girl but looking and dressing like the direct opposite of what a girl would want to touch.
Flash-forward to now, grab a Stiegl and then take a quick trip with Marty back to last week. The same two guys sat and watched the same Hayden but in almost every other way, it was a completely different experience. Instead of sitting on the floor in plaid shorts in Oshawa, I sat in a seat at the Danforth Music Hall in expensive pants that I consciously bought cause the nice man told me my ass looked great in them. Beside me was the same friend but this version had a beard, could dress himself and has become quite the successful purveyor of media. Beyond having 5 albums to draw upon and a sweet head of bigger hair, Hayden mostly looked and sounded the same; he even played one of the same songs. There was however, one overt change that spurred this whole flashback into motion.
Due to reasons of creepiness, Hayden felt he couldn’t sing about pinning for the love of a 16 year old. As someone who works with 16 year olds on a daily basis, I understand the feeling. In ‘Bad As They Seem,’ the girl of Hayden’s dreams magically turned from being 16 to being 23 (an arbitrary age based on how it good it sounds with the word ’seems’). Quite obviously, this gave the whole flashback comparison some empirical data to work with. How did I go from wanting to sell my sole to see a 16 year old girl’s boobs to having Hayden, who is older than me, change the lyrics of his first ever single because it’s too creepy to even sing about 16 year old girls (and if it were me, I’d probably end up with my ass fired)?
Unlike drug related flashbacks, my experience last week actually meant something beyond giggling and thinking ‘whoa…..I remembered that.’ Being slapped with such an easy comparison of events and how they were so completely the same yet so completely different forced me to take account of the decade and a half that occurred in between. Should I be concerned that I was effectively doing exactly the same thing with exactly the same person that I was when I was 14 (or 15)? Is this not a sign of stagnation and inability to branch out and experience life beyond the Greater Toronto Area? Shouldn’t this decade of immense change have actually altered what I do and who I do it with? No. And I’m glad it didn’t. In a rare moment of self appreciation, I think if I were able to feel pride (I have a medical condition that doesn’t allow that to happen) I should be proud that I have survived such a clamorous decade and can still enjoy the same thing I did when I was 14 with the same person at my side. Now, if we were still dressed in over-sized t-shirts with matted hair and unattended B.O., sitting on the ground in Oshawa and were pinning for the love of 16 year olds……….that’s a bird of a different feather.
