Missing the Hand That Hits You

Acquired tastes come at a cost. There's a common reason for feeling tardy. The present is the only minefield.

There's a difference between resigning yourself to something and loving it. But the difference gets lost. It did for me.

Feeling tardy

“I don’t feel tardy,” is quip from Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher. A little joke, a little throwaway.

But it’s also true. No kid feels like they showed up late, not even in America in the twentieth century, which was drunk on its own history. The bender was so bad that at some point in the ‘90s, they tried to declare an end to history. That worked out about as well as when they outlawed beer.

As a kid in the ‘80s, grownups wanted to make sure you knew you were tardy. You missed the party. You missed the lesson, and now they had to go back and explain it all over again, either at the Boston Tea Party or the end of World War Two or at least the oil crisis.

Color schemes

When I was young, I got to watch the world change colors, or at least color schemes. In the early eighties, it’s a lot of hay-and-clay earth tones and a preference for rounded angles. I’m four. All I know is that I’m joining a conversation in the middle.

And I like the earth tones, because I’m four and I like everything, give or take. They’re just how everything looks. Only later does the palette click as a generational self-soothing mechanism for boomers on a comedown from mind-expanding drugs and high ideals.

When I hit seven or eight, the mood shifted. There was a lot of money and exercise and second wives among the people who decided what things looked like. A lot of fluorescent colors, leather jackets and screaming guitars. I’m seven or eight, and I at least want to like everything.

Now I’m older, and I’ve given up on wanting to like everything. Something’s been lost. But I’m not even sure I like much of what was going on forty years ago, aside from wood paneling and the original Van Halen.

Packing for an epiphany

It’d be nice if there was a logic to history, something like: People react to pain and pursue pleasure, en masse.

Pleasure is a relief from pain. But sometimes it’s a relief from a pain you didn’t know you had - this can be the most incredible pleasure.

One description of an epiphany is the discovery of a deep, lasting pain at the very moment it evaporates. This is different from eating a sandwich when you’re hungry. But we can count on the pains of hunger, and we make sure to have sandwiches ready.

The thing that makes each year different from the last is the pains we don’t even know we have. The future may be the answer to the present. But it’s not the answer to the present as we understand it.

A kink

Hot for Teacher the song is about that twist that makes desire hold. In the song, at first, Dave’s a kid in school, cracking wise. He’s a born smartass. And I’d guess he caught some flak from teachers in his day. At the very least, they told him he was tardy. And Dave thought otherwise.

According to the story, the band wrote the song because grown-up Dave was fucking a teacher.

The teacher doesn’t like you. She’s the prison warden. And here you are, hot for teacher. Worth noting.

When memory lane becomes memory trench

I live in New York City, a port town. Before Verrazano and Hudson and the Erie Canal and the Pennsylvania Railroad - and likely after - it sits astride vast migration routes of fish and birds. It’s a spot of earth that’s always facilitated movement.

They say ten percent of the city’s human population turns over every year. I’ve been here almost 28 years now. There are very few people still here from those days. Same goes for restaurants, bars, movie theaters, clothing stores and so on.

Like any New Yorker, I could regale you with stories of how it used to be - the bars, the parties, the chaos. People like me like to tell stories like that. Tell enough of them, though, and you realize that nostalgia is the opposite of magic trick - it sucks magic from where we are here and now.

Cadillacs and Ray Bans

I also catch myself yearning for the brash certitude and insouciance that’s now only visible within the amber of an industrial product. Moments are fleeting, but purchases can last for years and even decades.  

Nostalgia is an optical illusion

The things I loved back then, were they so great? Or did they just seem great because being twenty years old is unbelievable? You look good. You feel good. You have what feels like all the time in the world. If you can tie your shoes two days in a row, you’re showing real potential.

The men and women your age look good, and could do anything at any moment, sexually and otherwise. It’s so good that the biggest danger is you’ll get depressed about all the great stuff you’re missing out on.

Counterpoint

But that was just a fleeting sensation. And if you remember more carefully, it often fled entirely.

The past was shit. It’s okay to say. I was there. I remember being a kid and saying this sucks. And they said that’s all there is. I pressed. They shrugged. I stalked off.

It was a world fondly remembered for reasons obscure - a world of television sets, cigarettes and sugar substitutes. It was a world where I never much minded being called crazy, given the alternative.

Don’t take my shit away

But now even the shit part - boring jobs that would last for decades and stick shifts and pay phones and greasy-spoon lunch counters and cheap, smoky bars - is going away. And I can’t help but become the worst of the old people, who bitch about things that few remember and almost no one ever liked.

It’s like William Blake bewailed the arrival of the dark satanic mills of London. Then two hundred years later, Bruce Springsteen bewailed the loss of those same dark satanic mills in Ohio.

Borne back

Nostalgia isn't a great answer, even for a basement renovation. It may be a place to hide from the present, or from what the past actually was. But eventually the knowledge that you’re hiding from something seeps through and poisons everything.

The winners get tripped up worse than anyone. Like the end of the Great Gatsby, those few who escape the daily hustle for bread and safety are always re-enacting or rewriting a past that didn’t exist on unsuspecting bystanders. Generally, this is no fun.

You can’t go back. You can’t project a great old movie onto a busy street. And preservation is a hard game. You’re usually losing the minute you start to play.

The other past - the future

Like the past, the future lives almost exclusively in your mind. Like the past, it’s a playground for all kinds of fantasies.

Unlike the past, almost anything could happen in the future. It can be preferable to the past if you don’t like what’s already happened, or if you have a score to settle.

When comparing the past, present and future, the present is probably the least popular of the three. It’s not impervious to revision and fantasy. But it’s less susceptible than the other two.

Suspicious territory

The present moment has a bad reputation, with good reason. Everyone who’s ever died, died in the present moment. The present moment is where we will all die. Even if we’ve never considered that, we know it.

Even the future, after you’ve gone, can’t exactly hurt you. You’re already living in the future already, in your imagination, so how bad can death be? Then you realize your fantasizing and you snap back to the present, where death could find you at any moment.

How can you build anything, like a picture of the world, on such a treacherous foundation?

So you’re left with the past, which is just a pile of sensations and fixations arranged according to habit. At least it’s safe-ish. It’s a place that you didn’t die.

Glorious views and terrible feelings

Sometimes something is happening that’s so beautiful and so big and so immediate that there’s no right guilt for missing it. But I feel like I’m missing it.

The unswept room

The entropy equation, which is the only thing in physics for the unchanging direction of time, says that as heat disperses through a system, that system moves from order toward chaos. But it’s pretty loose with what it calls order. Order is just the starting state. Disorder is everything other than that.

This predisposition says something about order - namely that order is where you make it. But making order takes time, if only the second you need to recognize it. That means order is always at least a little bit in the past. It always just left when you got there.

A remote-control car

To act with any orientation, you have to keep a foot in the past. Great athletes can collapse the space between orienting themselves and acting to almost nothing.

But they have a crutch - the game. Outside of such clear rules and clear objectives, the interval between orienting yourself and acting takes at least a second, and can exceed the length of a lifetime.

Even for a decisive person, it can feel like steering a car from the back seat. In a complicated situation, it can feel like steering from ten feet behind or from a distant hilltop. It’s an anxious place.

That old chestnut

People who write about this stuff love the phrase the problem of time, and as a writer, I see why. People like to solve problems. But no one can solve time. You’re claiming to jump into an impossible fight. But then you throw the reader into the jackpot.

But time isn’t necessarily a problem at all. It’s a solution. It’s a mildly addictive medicine for terror. It’s a magic trick that leaves us sad and makes us tardy.

Selected bibliography

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

An award-winning riff on nostalgia - The 6th Finger of Tommy the Goose