Coming back to live in the town where I grew up carries some odd associations with it. I drive by certain spots, and my thoughts turn to the music I was listening to or the comics or books I was reading. I think I've mentioned this in the past few years, since moving back from London, but it's been thrown into sharper relief in the past six weeks, as I've switched from working out at the gym to running or walking in my old neighborhood.
I passed through different parts of the old neighborhood on two occasions today. The first was this morning, when I went on my run that took me past my old house and my old elementary school. The second was on a big walk after lunch, when I passed the elementary school again and walked around the houses of friends from those years.
As I thought about afternoons spent playing Star Tropics at one friend's house, it struck me (as it frequently does) how much replaying games or re-experiencing certain media is more an attempt to recapture the feeling of experiencing those things for the first time.
Not only that, but this nostalgia affects what I write. I'm aware of tics and idiosyncrasies that come straight from the comics and science fiction novels I was reading in high school, and I'd say the past few years have been a never-ending attempt to purge these tics from the way I tell my stories.
Or maybe I shouldn't be so quick to completely purge them - part of what informs a person's personality is the conversation they have as adults with the lessons they drew from media they experienced as kids. As a teenager I wanted more space battles and more questioning of Gene Roddenberry's vision from Star Trek; as a man in middle age I get tired of the bombast of shows like Discovery and want to get back to stories about how smart and well-intentioned people tackle problems like adults.
At the same time, it feels odd to write that I'm "a man in middle age", because the teenager (or child), as I was then, never feels so far from the surface. Part of it is dismay at the passage of time, and the thought that I get ever closer to decay and irrelevance and oblivion, but part is also cognitive dissonance that the "I" encompasses such a different person now compared with back then.
Paradoxically I might not feel this disconnect so clearly if I'd stayed in Palo Alto the entire time, or if I'd come straight back after college. My suspicion is that the disconnect is more marked, and appears in such specific places, because I'm confronted with triggers to these memories for the first time since I formed them. And in the case of spots I pass more frequently, it's become my habit to think about how those places reminded me of the video game or book or comic, which brings up memories of the thing again.
It's a reminder of how the brain forms grooves and your thoughts fit along those grooves quite easily, whether you like it or not. What's funny is that it also happens with new stuff I experience now - certain things remind me of working out in or wandering around London, despite there not being any explicit link. These memories then trigger thoughts of specific things I used to do or friends I used to hang out with, and as I return to the piece of media (for example a YouTube video) I'm reminded of the place or person I was thinking of the last time I watched it.
Brains are weird.
At any rate, it's a funny phenomenon that I think back to the Legion of Superheroes whenever I pass by the first condo complex my dad lived in after he and my mom split up, or that I think of the Quick Man level from Megaman 2 whenever I walk by the community center where I used to play kids' league basketball. I suppose you could call them both traumatic experiences, in their own way (basketball gave me nightmares for years afterwards), but it's interesting how the brain creates full snapshots of memories, and the weirdest triggers bring them back.
Proust, of course, wrote about this at length in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, but we can only imagine what he'd have had to say about a reboot of his favorite comic series or the feeling of finally beating one of Megaman 2's toughest bosses. In the absence of his thoughts on these topics, I can only say that it's not always bitter to get back to that child-mind, or to see the continuity of my own sense of self between then and now. The question is whether I'll feel the same about the shows and books and whatever that I'm experiencing now, when I revisit them in twenty years' time.
Or maybe I'll just still be thinking of Megaman 2?
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