Me Dia - it's a poorly translated, double entrende Latin
Published on: Feb 13, 2023Filed under: Media
As lame as this might sound, I have long used pop culture as a personal dog ear. I can trace my affinity for Electric Six[x] back to a record store in Vancouver that I visited on a whirlwind vacation after the war; Damien Rice to seeing Closer[x] in the theater the same year; and the USA Trilogy to buying Dos Pasos’ The 42nd Parallel[x] at a book shop in Greenwich village…also in 2004.
[Editorial aside: It’s probably the nostalgia of being in his early 40s coloring that. I’m sure being in your 20s in the early 2000s was statistically fine. They probably weren’t actually great.]
Years ago, and with plenty of bourbon and cigarettes, I even attempted to chronicle those pop culture meanings under the too-clever title “Audiobiography.” The project fell apart when there were only a few dozen pages of interesting interactions. Ah, what we don’t know in our late-twenties.
But, as I processed through my divorce, my first reaction was to reach for familiar media.
And when I moved to the farm, I found myself back in 2008 - the year I moved to Richmond - by way of 2022.
I had moved to Richmond shortly before Fringe started, the five seasons of that series mapped really well to my first five years back in Virginia after a ten-year absence. So, as I settled into my disconnected lifestyle, that was the first thing I rewatched.
Fourteen years removed, or less for the later seasons, the structure of the series showed through. The artifice of commercial breaks forces certain beats. So does an episode count, when you’re stretching a greater plot across it.
This isn’t to say that it was bad. Fringe is still good TV. And it’s absolutely worth a watch. Especially in the later seasons when alternatives are a major consideration.
I really enjoyed re-watching Fringe.
But Fringe at 42 in 2022 is very different than Fringe at 28 in 2008. I’ve learned a ton since then. I’ve lived a ton since then. The reality of loss dulls the empathy exhibited towards fictional loss in some areas, and be damned if it doesn’t heighten it in others.
After Fringe, I went right into finally re-watching Chuck - a show I half empathize (a tall, goofy, non-grad from a super prestigious college that worked dead-end jobs for too long) and half envy (all the rest) too much.
[Editorial aside: yeah, he spent 200 hours watching Australian blondes acting with American accents]
Even my reading was largely held in the past. My first attempt was reading the Wheel of Time started in 1995, and I’m either on my third or fourth. I didn’t keep track. Reading - or more accurately ‘listening,’ - to those books has been an extension of who I was. But I'm almost done. And I did the math - it's taken me almost as long to get through The Wheel of Time as it took write it.
Part of me thinks that this consumption has been reassuring myself that not all of my past decisions were so egregiously wrong. That I had a history of good decisions. That my memory wasn’t faulty.
Another non-trivial portion of my mind was seeking to go back. To undo the past five years.
I don’t think either is correct, not in any sort of entirety. Sure, I spent a non-trivial amount of time re-evaluating the past years of my life. And yes, I questioned a lot of past decisions. And you’re right, I wanted the embrace of familiar media. And escapist media to boot.
But it wasn't all escape. And it wasn't all regret. But, after all that, it did feel like a reset.
The past weekend, felt like an inhale.
[Editorial aside: Ugh, that’s a bad metaphor. F’ it. It stays]
This weekend I started to embrace new media.
New stories.
Sure, the first was baby steps - Link’s Awakening on the Switch. It was a game that came out when I was a kid. But only in Japan. And as an 80s baby, those three words ‘only in Japan’ carry weight. The game, at least the Switch version, feels like sanded nostalgia. Like the version of the original Zelda I recall, but buffered and buffed up to be palatable in 2023.
The other is also a bunt - Black Sails. A pirate show that aired on Stars during the last bare days of the Golden Age of Television (2014-2017). I had downloaded the first season ages ago and never gotten around to watching it. But fuck me if, in the first fifteen minutes of the first episode I hadn’t bought the entire series on Blu Ray [editorial aside: farm life].
This wasn’t a great big “I can do new things again” post, though.
No, that's weak sauce.
I’ve been flirting with the idea of writing again. Not this, not notes. But actually writing - with the intent of publishing - something I couldn’t process in the last five years.
Over the course of this weekend, I started working that out. I think an old, bad book I wrote still has the seed of a good book in it. So, this weekend, I started carving that seed out.
Let’s see if being a farmer is more conducive to writing a book than being a mid-atlantic, urban roustabout was.