"Time Is the Final Currency"

 Noel Paul Stookey once said of his hen-house turned home in Blue Hill, Maine, that sitting on his stairs at 7 in the morning, watching the sun come up over the Atlantic, that he was blessed, having moved away from New York City and all the hustle and bustle.  People thought he was crazy. "There are two ways to miss things," he said, "One is if it goes by too fast, and the other is if we go by too fast.  I've always complained about the bicycles speeding by me as I walk, or the motorcycles, that they zoom down the paths so fast that they miss the beauty that's all around them.  Sometimes it's better to watch the trees grow, and look up into the sky and watch the planes circle and descend toward the airport many miles away.  That time slows down in the rural areas, it's such a wonderful experience.  It's no wonder that people leave the urban areas and go out to the boondocks where they will be away from all the noise and commotion.  I know I would.

There's nothing better in this world than being at my grandparent's lake house in Sulphur, Oklahoma, late at night , looking out the window over the Lake of the Arbuckles, and watching the moon rise, listening to the crickets, sitting in a recliner and letting the world go it's own way.  In quiet reflection I have those memories now.  I don't know if I had them back then.  If I had more money than sense, I'd buy that lake house back. I wrote a blog about it here.

Or perhaps, since I'm in Georgia, I'd go with a house here.  There's a house in Washington County, just across the line from Deepstep, GA, that is a wonderful house out in the woods.  The only people that go by it are hunters during deer season.  Beautiful dark wooden floors and furniture. I found it on Google Earth, and have a mark on it, just in case...  I doubt I'll ever have the money to get a  house like that, but even something similar would be nice.  Something Thoreauish.

I know it's a little early to think about this for me, but it's come up because of my mother's recent heart surgery, and her having to face her own mortality. But she's talked about how she wants to live out the rest of the years of her life. And it got me thinking about the same thing.  Truly, I'm only 36, and I have half of my life left to live, and who knows how the country will go during those years, or the economy, but I do know that I'll make it somehow.  And I also know that, when the time comes for me to grow old, I want to do it away from the city sprawl.  I want to watch the rings form within the trees, year by year.

It's amazing what things will get you thinking about your own mortality.  I guess it's something that's been going through my mind lately.  My mom said that while she knows that God and Heaven await her after she dies, that until then, survival and living are pretty important.  There's a natural fear of death, I think we all have that, but I think the more fearful part is losing control of the life you have left.  I've seen it, through my grandmothers, how dementia and finances and diseases can slip reality away, where dreams become more real than reality, and there are times I wouldn't mind that, but life is so amazing, so beautiful, I don't think I would want to spend the last part of my life stuck in some room in a nursing home, propped up in a wheelchair in some hallway.  I've seen too many old men like this at the rehab place my mom was in, and also at the nursing home my grandmother was in temporarily.  Don't keep an eye on me, dear nurses, take me outside and let God keep an eye on me. He's done that well so far.  Let me see the cardinals flit from tree to tree, and the summer wind ease up gently against my face, and then on to places unknown.  It's better this way.

I also say all this because I've heard some great music lately, a pattern in the writings of some great rock songwriters, as they look at their own lives and see death a'coming.  The advantage that they have is that they can express their feelings (much like I do here in a blog) through the art media that they are known for.  And while they create their works, much like the artwork on the blog above, they release it for us to hear and see and say, "yeah, I get you." Thankfully, with the Internet being what it is, I can put together those works here on the blog.

Bob Dylan took a weekend and wrote all of the songs in Time out of Mind, a masterpiece of blues and introspection that I absolutely love.  I think he, like the other's I'll show below, got to the point where they calmly look at their old age and see death coming, but not quite here yet.  It's off in the future a little ways, but close enough to pay attention to.  The track I love , well, I like all of them, but the one that fits this blog is "It's Not Dark Yet."

 

His tour mate for the past few years, Paul Simon did a track on You're the One that sounded like it would be his last album (he's done 1.5 since (the one he did with Brian Eno was not worth the .5), and it deals with the end.  The image where he can "release [his] fists at last" is so powerful.  Such a haunting song.  And all of these are.  Nostalgic, Raw, leaving the singer exposed without many instrumental backups to keep the voice hidden.

 

Finally, check out David Crosby's new studio album, Croz as a wonderful mixture of introspective songs and lamentations about the way the world is (although not so much that the ideology sticks out like a sore thumb) The first track has a minor key meandering sound, while talking about the city, and it reminded me of the other songs that deal with age and mortality.  His other one that fits this is "Time is the Final Currency" from the album CPR he did with his biological son, but it's harder to find on Youtube.

This Used to be My Playground

If you drive up to Lake Hefner in Oklahoma City, and turn into one of the lakeside parks, you will see, at least I think, a playground of immense size and stature, towering over the lake. I am sure that the rocketship that was built at the park was not as big as the one in my imagination, looking back at those days, when my grandmother would take my brother and I the many blocks to this amazing structure. It was the fusion of man's understanding of the child's imagination. I have seen very little, before or since, that blended together steel and matter with the underlying dreams in a child's mind. To me, it was an arduous rampway to the top of the rocket. In my mind, the ramp was closed in, usually filled with children, and actually a bit scary. In the photos I've seen, it was an open walkway, much like the breezeways above interstates. It's amazing how memories change, mold themselves into something larger and more ominous than what they truly were. And how sad it made me, to look down from the satellites of Google's all seeing eye and zoom into the playground I once played in, and see the rocketship gone.

Same state, but drive, then, to the school I went to as a child, Mustang Valley Elementary, and there you will find monkey bars of various shapes, including a rocket-shaped one. So many battles were fought on that rocket ship, of Thundercats and Transformers, with my friends, Timothy and Drew and all the others, amazing times. And come to think of it, I probably got more exercise in those days than anything else. I wasn't all that overweight then, although you would never have known that by the Presidential Physical fitness tests scores I had. What fun is there in running around a gym field, with asthma threatening to creep in and the dandelions and the wasps and whatnot always lurking about? It's no fun. But being Lion-O...now that is something different. It was our own little world then, and I loved it.

[Addendum... looking for pictures of that place, I find that Mustang Valley renovated (read, took all the fun out of) the playground, taking the slides, the swings, the huge teeter totters, the beloved rocket ship, everything away, and replaced it with safer, more boring play toys. Curse them for taking away such treasures. Now children will not be able to use their imaginations and play on the dangerous wonders that truly made us children. And looking at Google, all the trees around the school have been cut down to make room for neighborhoods and houses. At least we still have our memories.][If we have to be safe all the time, we will never face danger. Climbing to the top of the Monkey Bars and standing upon the zenith of the rocket ship... it is like conquering a mountain. And if we fall... our skinned knees will have been well worth it.]

One more playground story, before I get to where I really want to take this entry. There still is a quaint little playground located just to the west of the dorms of Georgia College in Milledgeville. Nothing special about them, except for the memories I had of the swing sets there, where in my Freshman year the Ramsey twins (whom I have not heard from since then) and some of our other friends, would go and swing under the shade of the giant pine trees. It really was refreshing, the cool winds going down into the river valley, even in summer. So it was a great shock to me that one year, after returning back to campus, I wandered over to the park to see that every pine tree had been cut down, leaving a brown, ugly surface around all the playground equipment. During the hot days, the sun would beat down upon the metal fixtures and make them too hot to touch, especially for the little children that played on them. I could easily see them getting 1st degree burns from the heated metal. What good is a playground without the trees around it? The shade is metaphor as well as real. The real world cannot get to you for that little while you are on the swing sets. To see those trees cut down and the park destroyed, in spirit, was depressing.

***

Now, I venture, these playgrounds lay barren and empty for most of the time. They become hangouts for gangs and drug dealers (that was a problem, apparently, for the Stars and Stripes Park). The innocence leaves and is left only by the leftovers, by the people longing to get back to that time, but never making it through chemicals and violence. No, the playgrounds are empty. Schools have had to cut back the recess time to provide more education for failing test scores (and not for the children that take them), and city budget cuts have made replacing old equipment impossible, so the grass grows up between the iron monkey bars and cracks form on the pavement. It reminds me of Ray Bradbury's "The Pedestrian," which, if you haven't read it, go find a copy on the Internet, it should be there. I'll wait, it's only a 1.5 pages long.

http://mikejmoran.typepad.com/files/pedestrian-by-bradbury-1.pdf

For in that story, the citizens of that fictional country lived within their houses, fixated on the moving lights of the television screens, and the lone walker outside is picked up by a robot police officer and taken to the asylum as if he was a crazy person.

Our playgrounds today are no longer the steel beams of playground rocketships or, in another since, of the rocketships that are made of the words in books. Rather, they are the images of those forms in computer games, on television. The playgrounds we visit to escape reality, to stretch our imaginations across vast spaces, those places exist only within our minds. They exist as bytes and pixels on a computer screen. Whereas we might have fought against real imaginary dragons on the school playground, now people slaughter virtual dragons in the caves of Warcraft or other games. We chase girls (or gossip about guys) not on the pavement of a schoolground playplace, but rather on the public grounds of Facebook. It's all the same in reality. Why shouldn't we all just spend our recesses texting each other and saying nothing? Not long are the days when the playful screams of children will fall silent on school playgrounds as they talk more through the keyboards on their cell phones than with their mouths. In future times, when I am old and gray, and children who may be quite used to space travel, will ask me if I've ever been in space, I will say, "Yes, although my feet have never left the ground."

[Okay... now I'm just ticked... all the playgrounds I played in as a child are gone, replaced with safer, more boring pieces of plastic. Damn the lawyers and their litigation. I want danger! I want to climb to the top of the monkey bars and look out over the cement playground and watch people skin their knees! I'm gonna scan pictures from my yearbook of the playground, and also provide links of sites I find that deal with preserving playgrounds and monkey bars and all the things we loved as kids. ]

A Driving Song

There are many things I would rather do than drive.  Drinking Lysol is one of them.  Driving is a nuisance, a menial task that takes entirely too much time and costs too much money. Watching the traffic reports on the Atlanta interstates reminds me of the scene in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," where thousands of mindless, wordless people are crossing the bridge into the city.  And inside those cars, people are listening to their radios, to endless music with indeterminable meanings, to conservative talk show host rattling on truths and half truths and sometimes outright lies, all to mesmerize the listener into action.  Inside those cars are the children screaming or sleeping or playing, looking up out of the roof hatch up at the sky and dreaming they could fly, seeing themselves move through the clouds as the road moved under them.  I think REM got it exactly right in the video for "Everybody Hurts," as, in the end, they are all people trapped inside their cars, trapped inside the memories and the thoughts that can't escape, but sit, traveling as they are traveling, through miles of pavement.  The only real escape, as in the video, is to get out of the cars and walk.  Something totally unexpected.  To shout from the bridge and run the other way.  To say, "Snap out of it!" to the people on Eliot's bridge.  To get out and walk and never to look back.  Yes.  It's escape.  It's illogical and probably impossible, but you have to look at driving this way.   While most people see driving, much as in the car commercials, as getting away from your life and winding down twisted roads toward the mountains or the beach, leaving their lives behind, it doesn't always work that way.  For what if those people weren't able to leave themselves behind, like old laundry or the faded memories that appear and then dissolve away?  What if you have to bring yourself with you, with all the memories and the heartaches and the trials and troubles that have gathered and stuck to the underside of your mind like barnacles on a veteran ship?  Then it wouldn't matter how far you drove, or how loud the music was, it would still be the same you, driving down the same road.  And you would be waiting for you when you got there.  With the same problems, the same expectations. 

So you see why I don't like driving.  But sometimes.... oh yes, sometimes.  When driving down the interstates at the end of the evening, during the twilight hours, there is this temptation.  To, as John Mayer would say, to keep the car and drive. To pass the exits of home and just keep on going.  Then, and only then, would the me that is me not be there.  Because then is freedom, is creation.  You become clay again, to be molded in your own fashion.  It's why so many artists write songs about their cars.  For instance, David Crosby, on the Thousand Roads album, wrote "Too Young To Die,":

Sweet old racin' car of mine
Roarin' down that broken line
I never been so much alive
Too fast for comfort, too low to fly
Too young to die

In a world totally different from the world in which he lived, from the drug use and all the escapes that are not really escapes at all but just temporary reprieves.  As in dreams, or books, or video games, or driving for hours into the wild unknowns. But in the end, there's always the return, back to reality. And that's okay, because you can't escape from you forever, but like a shot of Ether, a temporary break into the lands of your favorite book, it's a suspension of this life into another, or into nothingness.   

One of my associates at work talked about how the past experiences that I've had with driving effects the way I see it now.  And that makes sense.  As a child, it was either going to the store or to the doctors office (through which I was feeling really ill, if I was going to Doctor Gormley about something.), or to get my allergy shots at the hospital clinic in north Oklahoma City.  Which of course was wonderful getting a shot or two every week.  The destination was the problem.  I was never looking forward to going anywhere.  The only time during that part of my life I looked forward to was the drive down to Sulphur, Oklahoma where my grandparents had their lakehouse (see previous blogs). Then it was an hour drive south on I-35 past Pauls Valley and Wynnewood and Davis, down long a windy roads into a forest and gravel roads and to a secluded house where the world never seemed to invade, not even television.  That was freedom, because the end place continued the illusion of getting away from everything.  Which, of course, it didn't, but as I was a child, there was little to run away from.  But my dad still had his heart problems and the economy and all the adults seemed to have some problem or another, either with each other or with themselves.  But it was easier to forget there. 

Of course, then there are the cars themselves.  There is a certain joy in owning your own car.  Everyone knows this. For some reason, actually owning a car, making it your own, however that's done, be it french fries under the seat, or those adaptations you make so that the car will go down the road, the idiosyncrasies that make the car what it is, almost makes it organic. My 1988 Honda was like that.  And the stories of how, since no one told me where drive was on the stick shift, I plopped it to the bottom and drove off to Macon going 80. Now, going 80 on low gear tends to ruin things.  Thus my $2,000  Honda cost me $3500.  And then I learned to drive the car with both feet, with the left foot on the break and the right on the gas, so it wouldn't die at intersections and such.  Or my 1997 Mercury Mystique which had problems from the get go, and it only lasted a year or so, but I liked the car.  It was mine.  It was an exit.  It was potential.  I think we all fall in love with that potential, with the idea that, although we never do it, that car is a method by which we run away from it all.  It's the feeling in those hours before the sun sets when we just want to keep driving, away from everything we've known and never come back.  Should we ever do it, we'd find simply the same us lying over the next hill, at the next exit, past the intersection and the rest stop. 

And if I ever decide to go driving, to go on a vacation away from that which is me, I'll put Shawn Mullins' album Soul's Core on the CD player and keep it on rotate.  He captures the essence of nostalgia (which is really just escape) and the longing for freedom all into the tracks of the music, which, like the automobile, travels throughout the US finding places that we've never been, but would like to, one day, just around the setting of the sun. 

Hidden Things

Nostalgia lurks within many things.  The irresistible pull of the past, like some giant electromagnet, it always brings us back to those memories, through smells or tastes or actions, things that we did before so many years ago.  The taste of a Hardees' Hot Ham & Cheese on a winters day after church.  Now that was a memory, and all the more poignant when the empty shells of Hardees restaurants now filled with Pawn shops or Chinese establishments.  We savor the foods of our childhood not because of exquisite tastes, but rather because of the memories of long ago.  It's what makes Braum's, a fast food chain (oh, but so much more than that!) in Oklahoma and Texas, such an amazing place to eat.  It had the best of everything. 

Such was a similar feeling when I sat down at my computer and pulled up a game from PopCap, Escape from Whisper Valley.  It is a Hidden Object game, where a thin story line brings together scenes in which is hidden different things (a hat, a cat, a vase, a comb...etc...) for you to find.  The game could call for finding 3 birds, one of which is flying in the sky, the other drawn into a painting, and one an origami folded swan.  Or it might call a future butterfly, in which you would find a caterpillar.  Some games of this ilk are better than others, and this particular game is one of the best I've played.  It also takes me back to looking through the pages of Highlights magazine and finding the Hidden Pictures page.  Although it's a magazine for children, the Hidden Pictures activity is extremely difficult.  I remember, as a child, looking through the pages, bit by bit, trying to find the hidden toothbrush, the bird...etc... Sometimes I would have my grandmother with me and we'd look together for them. 

Of course, now finding the hidden things, the needle in haystacks, is what I do.  I find the hidden book by Anne Tyler misplaced with Tolstoy.  The top corner of a magazine amongst all the others.  The unwrapped Playboy hidden behind the Kids bibles.  It's what I do.  And the Dopamine levels that a found object projects is what makes it a great job to do.  A researcher who finds a long lost article that proves his thesis is as to be ecstatic over his find as me catching a sought for book out of the corner of my eye.  In fact, it's the same brain chemical response.  It is the natural Prozac that is created just by finding something.  It's what makes the Hidden Object games such as Escape from Whisper River so addicting, because so many people cannot find the things they seek for in life.  Whether it be their keys or their lost birth certificate or true happiness.  It's the hope that, in finding something, we will discover something truly hidden from us. 

I looked over what I just wrote, and realized that I started with one theme and switched to another.  But, as I looked at it, the theme is the same.  Sensory recall, the bringing up to the surface a memory and a feeling from the depths of the subconscious mind, from the great rooms of filing cabinets that store all memories somewhere in the brain.  That, in fact, results in the same Dopamine release as finding that long lost toy under the bed.  And there's nothing like the smell and taste of a Hardees Hot Ham and Cheese to do that.  The warm comfortable foods that we eat, or the smells that remind us of our grandmother's kitchens.  We find something in each sensory touch.  It's an amazing feeling.  It brings us to a place where we were once happy and secure, loved maybe, and we can feel the remnants of it for a short time, before looking for the next needle. 

A Room With No View, or Praising God in a Box.

[It's taken about a week to work on this...]

So the Oscars were last night (what was up with Zac Efron's hair?), and honestly, I watched it because it was slightly better than all the other drivel that was being broadcast at the same time. I wonder if the execs in the higher echelons of television have decided not to care about quality of programming, since we don't clearly. The same ratings exist now with worthless "reality" programming than the quality shows that were on the air not even a decade ago. Since "reality" is much cheaper, why not? And on most channels, 3 minutes of programming is followed by 3 minutes of commercials, with the result being that I have forgotten what I was watching, and thus, wasted 6 minutes of my life. But I am off track for what I really wanted to talk about.

***
I am curious why, when people build structures to live their lives in, they often construct them in manners totally opposite to their purpose. When I went to church, some years ago, the Baptist church I attended had been constructed many years before, added onto, and consisted of many staircases, small rooms, winding hallways, so much so that you could easily get lost going wherever your goal was. The rooms were small, ill lit by windows, and contained uncomfortable chairs and an hvac system that sometimes barely worked, keeping you too cold or too hot. Going to a place every weekend where you were lost, cold/hot, and uncomfortable, is hardly a way to spend a Sunday morning talking about faith, philosophy (which is what they should have been discussing), and Eternal salvation. I would much rather have spent the day talking about such things outside, under a tree, in the places where God is present. I would have rather kept notes on a slate made of wood and stone, and sat on the ground or an old tree stump, than in the rooms where we sat, much like chickens in a coup or cows in a stall. If a church building is to be about God's word, let it be built openly, where the vaulted roofs and the bright, plain windows would let the light shine in, and let prayers and praises float out into the heavens. Have the small rooms contain places for individual study, with comfortable chairs, and the lines of the roofs slanting up at angles to eternity. Man was not meant to worship in a box.

Nor was he meant to work in one either. Take how corporations make the buildings that they work in. The laborers sit in tiny cubicles, taking orders and mindlessly slugging away at their desks, dreaming about their calendars of Hawaii or whatever screen saver is currently showing pictures of paradises unknown. The windows on their world are unobtainable, unreachable, except for the pixels on the screen. They do not see the outside world, where the results of their labors are felt. There is no outward goal, only the struggles of what they do, day in and day out. The CEO might have windows in his corner office, overlooking the fountain and the forests outside, or overlooking the mighty cities that are the results of their success. Would that everyone could have an office that overlooked New York City, or Atlanta, to see the magnificence of what human beings can accomplish, when their dreams are realized through hard work and prevalence. Suddenly the minor bounces in the stock market don't seem so bad. The future, the window for which everyone peers outside at the unknown, is brighter, when the present is gazed at for what it is. But no one looks up to the heavens anymore, to the Empire State Building, to the complex construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, or of the Peachtree Tower (which my dad helped design the sprinkler system.). Instead, they see the ground, with their head held low, looking out for the cracks in the sidewalk, the mud on the streets. How can you look down and still look forward at the same time?

Corporations don't make their employees work "outside the box," literally, they are working inside them. Look at the plans for Google Inc., and their headquarters, and you will see the many windows (pun intended) and the open places, in which they work. Tell me they are not successful, when they can take a photograph of every square mile of the Earth, and allow us to travel along those paths and peek into every nook and cranny of our planet. How marvelous! You should try walking along the highway going from Western Canada to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and into Alaska. Such peace and tranquility, such openness of space. Such potential of creating a world where man and Earth can co-exist and thrive together, bringing exhalation to man and God alike.
***

If you ask me where I would want to live, I would describe for you a cabin located off of highway 212, and Lake Sinclair. A quaint fishing log structure, with maybe one or two rooms, a kitchen, and an overhang for parking the car under. That, and if there was a T1 line to the internet (because I am living in 2010 and not the 1860's, as Thoreau did), I would be all set. Or perhaps in a studio apartment overlooking the Porterdale waterfalls on the Yellow River, atop the Mill. But that's my love of old buildings. The reason I love that building is the tall, open ceilings and the large windows overlooking the river. I would enjoy that.

If you ask me the least favorite place I would want to live, I would tell you the old Napier Hall at Georgia College in Milledgeville. Quite possibly, in my opinion, the worst piece of architecture ever built on Earth. It would be more suitable for prisoners, who would never see the outside of the world again, than college students who are trying to expand their minds beyond the microcosms they live in. It was a box of stairs, small rooms, musty odors, and nothing that signifies the freedom a college student feels when he or she leaves home. Absolutely disgusting. And the Earth breathed a sigh of relief when it was torn down some years ago.
***

Many years ago, when I was in high school, we'd all rush away from those cement block prisons on unairconditioned cheese wagons to the relative freedom of our neighborhoods. Why they couldn't build public schools with a little more reflection of the growth that was expected inside I don't know. Heritage High School had, for years, these windows in each outer classroom that had been halfway painted over so that only a little light comes in, but you couldn't see anything outside. And the inside classrooms were just boxes which could have been Gas Chambers for all the comfort they gave. Today classrooms are made a little better, with some exceptions. If I were to teach someplace now, just based on Architecture, I'd go to Union Grove High School in Henry County, Georgia. Brilliantly designed, with clear light streaming into the wide hallways (Hall C at Heritage was so narrow, you just wanted to take a steamroller between classes and get rid of the people lounging around and totally blocking the arteries of the school.), and a cool round entryway with the gym in the center of the school with the rest expanding from the atrium next to the offices. Great style and function!

But I digress. During the summertime, after we've slaved away in these buildings, I'd go outside, hoping to find someone to play with, away from these boxes we call homes. But there'd be no one out. Everyone would be inside, playing their Playstations and watching TV, when the weather was nice and warm and people could be out playing and enjoying life. It's like I've said before, I've always yearned for the days before there were all the electronic distractions, when kids would go out after their chores were done and stay outside all day until supper was ready. The nostalgic times probably never existed the way they are painted, but the stereotype must have had some truth to it. Those times are long gone, and part of me wishes that some cyber-attack would destroy all these gadgets, these artificial windows into pseudo-worlds, so that we would all have to go outside and play again in the parks and streets. But the swings remain empty, the slides vacant, the local swimming holes become homes for the frogs and fishes, but no kids swinging out on ropes and jumping into icy water.
***
I'm gonna post this part of the blog and finish it later... honestly, on the days I've had off, I've done my grandmother's taxes and then spent the rest of the time trying to explain to her how I did them. I'm tired, and want to sleep.

The Senses of Learning

Imagine going to a college reunion, as I would have done this year, had they had such a thing at GC&SU (Milledgeville), and seeing all the people from your class, now 10 years older, with kids, failed dreams, or not, money, or not, and mostly with 30 pounds more or a half a head less. And there, betwixt conversation and speeches, wondering where the time went and how much had changed, there is the almost necessary singing of the Alma Mater, with the words printed on some programming sheet. And as it is sung, out of tune, with soggy nostalgia, would you wonder, for what are we missing? What makes the college years so utterly miserable, and yet so strongly yearned for? The days that I had my own apartment, going for my Masters degree, were the happiest days of my life, and yet, I was highly depressed. I went to Applebees every day to eat away my sorrow, and to run up my charge card.

It's amazing, the small, sensual details that reminds me of college. The things that make me yearn for the days when I was wondering about the campus from class to class. I thought about those, this morning, and thought I'd share the memories I had.

***
There's a certain way the college smells, in the early dawn, when Milledgeville is just waking up (well, save the students, cause they sleep till noon). But I was a morning person, and always woke up at 6 to get to the early classes, eat breakfast, go over to the computer lab (when I didn't have a computer)...etc... Squirrels there didn't seem to mind the students at all, and only ran away if you chased after them. But there were times that you sincerely wished for a good soaking rain, to wipe away the scent of living. Much as I remember playing outside after a thunderstorm in Oklahoma. It's remarkable how smells can link themselves over years of time, instantly triggering emotions of memories. For instance, I always loved walking by the Health building over near Music on my way to Clarinet Practice. They had an indoor pool, and the windows at the top of the building were open. On cold, winter evenings, the chlorinated warmth of the pool would filter out to the walkways, bringing memories of the YMCA in Bethany, with warmth that blankets your body and brings a glow to your skin, much as a cup of hot chocolate would. There is nothing so sensual as that smell.

***
Anyone who has been to college would immediately complain about the cafeteria food. Certainly, on the weekends, the food was barely edible. But the old Southern ladies that worked the back kitchen could fix the most wonderful Chicken Parmeshan with Noodles, and the Wok fixture made the best Caesar Salads I have ever tasted. I have spent years trying to imitate those salads. Down the street from SAGA (called that because of the company that owned the kitchen some 30 years ago, and the name just stuck even after the company moved out.), was a great restaurant called Brewers. It was a coffee shop that had soups, salads, sandwiches, and some sinfully wonderful cheesecakes. But the true divine food was served on Monday nights, when the soup of the day was Tomato Bisque. I have never tasted a liquid so golden or smooth, with flavors so wonderful. I have never equaled it, although I have tried many times. The restaurant is now out of business, and the secret of the soup gone forever.

***
Milledgeville is filled with old buildings, with Corinthian pillars of Neo-Greek architecture. Being in the RHA club (Residential Housing Association), I got to go inside the old Psychology building, the one that hadn't been used in years, where parts of the roof was gone, and the old, crickety stairs led up and up to places of dead knowledge. With rooms of desks and outdated psychological tools and tests, old 5" floppy disks, folders with who knows what inside. What grand design were these old towers of wisdom, now left to disintegrate. It always left me with such reverence and nostalgia for the past, even as the new computer labs left me with hope for the future, that knowledge could still exist in a world of reality TV shows and endless nights of inebriation.

***
But the highlight of being at college is definitely that feeling right after I walked out of the classrooms in the Arts & Sciences building feeling as if I had slewn (slayed, slewed??) killed a dragon. When the tests given were slaughtered and sliced and diced and an "A" was a certainty. Because the knowledge was there, the learning, was in my head and I had met my professors expectations. There is no greater feeling than this. And it's the feeling that I most long for now. I have talked about before, on another blog ( http://denzilpugh.blogspot.com/2008/01/faust-picard-and-pursuit-of-knowledge.html) how much I yearn for the continuing education that we seem never to get anymore. After work, it's the mindless electronic stimulation, eating of food, and then going to bed. We never learn anything anymore. I bring this up because I had a dream last night about being at something like a college, where music, sports, intellectual conversations, etc... was happening, and I want to look at the dream further and see how it could be implemented in real life. But that will take more than just being buried at the bottom of this blog. So I will end this here and start a new one, after I have set my brain on mix and cogitate.

Days at Arbuckle Lake

The camera of the eye is a truly remarkable machine. With each blink of the eyelid, we record the moments of our lives. It is burned on the film rolls that are stored in our heads, for us to relive in our dreams and nightmares, to pull up that unexpected flash of emotion at the smell of cherry pie or the sound of an ice cream truck. Because our films not only have pictures, but sights and smells and tastes and perceptions, both imaginary and real. Does the garden become more real as we remember it? Does the smell of the rose become more than just that as the references in our minds mingle with the recording of the encounter? Does a priori knowledge make what we've seen more or less real?

Honestly, I don't know, don't pretend to know. I've never pretended that my memories were anything more than what they were. My dreams are always just that, with certain obvious symbols that portray emotions, and the like. But sometimes, a dream is just a dream, and no amount of interpretation will make it anything else.

But we all have our memories, and although they fade and become scratched as time travels on, leaving them as faded as the oldest recordings on my VHS tapes, we still can remember them. By writing them down. By telling them to people who care (or don't). The stories that our elders have of days gone by. If only they were recorded for future historians and authors to hold in their hands, and cuddle them as soft lambskin. When people walk through the empty town of De Pew, Oklahoma, after all the people have died or moved out, leaving the town center abandoned and empty, what will they feel moving through their bones? The bike racks are empty, the lampposts with a lingering staple or two from advertisements of yard sales and the latest soap guaranteed to get your clothes sparkly white, dark as the night sets in. The bricks stand, waiting for the tornado that will assuredly knock them down. But for that time, the town still stands, and when, then, will you hear the laughter of children running down Main Street? Or the old men in short shirtsleeves arguing about the latest baseball game. Those sounds are somehow still there, locked in our heads. We know them, but they fade, as if in translucent shimmers rising up from some outlying farm where the chimney is still on, and an old farmer sits, waiting for the sun to set.

We all have memories like this. At least, I hope we do. I shudder to think what the world would be like if our children, growing up in metropolises and skyscrapers and video games violent and magical, what they will remember as they grow older and look back at their childhoods. Where are the magical places in their lives, where nostalgia takes root and grows and protects the inner memories of our younger days? I pray that someone will take them out to the country, if even for a few days, and show them the soil and the water in the rivers and the squirrels running to their nests. And the old people in rocking chairs and the gravel roads with grass growing in the middle, where tires have never tread. And the stars.... the children of our world will never see the stars. Orion will be dimmed, his sword, and the great nebulae within, left forgotten.

But I am glad that I have such memories. My grandparents, those that lived in Oklahoma City and have since passed on, had in their plans a lakehouse down in Sulphur, Oklahoma, where they would spend their days off. It was a magnificent house, built with a deck around the whole of the house (much of which I saw constructed by my dad, grandfather, and other friends as saw fit to help.) I saw the concrete poured, the metal supports lifted up, the wooden beams nailed together and secured onto the house. And on cool, crisp mornings, with the wind coming off the lake, I would go out and sit on the deck and drink orange juice. It was best in the mornings, when the wasps were still asleep. I was afraid of wasps.

Driving down to Sulphur from Oklahoma City was always an adventure. I created a game to pass my time on the road, namely, to find each one of the letters of the Alphabet on road signs and permanent housings. No license plates. I was always glad there was a Western Sizzlin' along the way, and I knew where there was a small sign that had a 'Q' on it if I hadn't found it yet. The hour drive through the small towns of Oklahoma, the signs saying Pauls Valley, Paoli, Davis, and the counties, marked off the minutes till we got to Sulphur and the Lake house. The curvy road from the main highway to the lake itself seemed to take forever. But soon there were gravel roads that connected A frames and Mobile homes to the real world, and the trees encroached upon society and occasionally you would hear the scrunchings of tarantulas as they tried to cross the road to the next field. Our lakehouse sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, with us owning all the land around it. Open the gate, and the red house stood on the left, and the boat house on the right, where the sand pit and gravel pit stood for us to make endless forts and imaginary places with. The boat house was usually filled with wasps, and so I never went in there.

The house itself was filled with the knickknacks of my grandmother, who collected antiques from her family who lived in the area, and it had a life all to itself. My grandfather's bedroom was blue, with a stand of DIY how-to books on one side, and an ancient black and white TV in it that didn't work. On top of it was a globe procured in the 40s or 50s, when most of Africa was owned by foreign powers. I suspect it was my dad's globe. My grandmother's bedroom was pure pink, with a armoire and a stool that my grandmother sat on to put on makeup. And it spun around and around and around and I got dizzy spinning around on it. I have a picture of me doing that, and I'll post it here when I can find it. And beyond the deck, a path that lead down into the forest, down to the lake where a small beach was that we could go and swim a little, or throw rocks, since the actual beach was at the end of the windy road.

If you take a look at a map, Sulphur, Oklahoma is next to the Lake of the Arbuckles, a small hilly region in southern Oklahoma. The town is called Sulphur because the rocks in the area, and the natural minerals in the ground make the water coming from the cold springs near the town smell like sulfur. They even have a fountain where you can go and drink it. The minerals in the water are supposed to be very nutritious. The park used to be called PLATT National Park, and was the smallest National park in the nation. But since it was so small, it was turned into the Chickasaw National Recreational Area, demoted as Pluto was recently. The nature center sat atop the spring-fed river, and it was definitely cold water. We'd go out from the nature center and, already having our swim suits on, take our shirts off and go play in the frigid water beside the center. the river ran through the park and into the lake, where the water was warm as bath water some summers. The beach was made as water ran over the road when the reservoir was made, with sand poured on top of the edge, so if you dug below the sand, you could easily find pieces of asphalt, which was great for skipping rocks in the water. The park is still there, and one day I'll go back and visit.

The reason I bring all this up, at this time, is that I discovered something wonderful recently that made me think about my experiences at the lake house, and I wanted to record it, so happy did my discovery make me. You see, if you pull up the property charts for the original designs for the lake house, you'll see it sits on a road that has a name. I forgot what it was called, and no one would know unless they went and looked at the original plans. Well, one day, as a we were walking down the gravel road to the main one, we got to the end of the road, where the doberman pincers live (and they loved chasing you), and we noticed there was no road sign. Now, I loved looking at maps and knowing where every road in Oklahoma City went (ask my mom, I asked her a million times where each road went... :) ) So the idea popped into my head, "We need a road sign here!" I was probably 7 or 8 at the time.

So names....what do we call this street we live on? The neighborhood where my house was had names of English towns. One of my classmates, Stewart, in elementary school, his dad built neighborhoods from nothing and he named a bunch of streets after his children and family. Denzil Road would have sent chills down my Grandfather's spine (his middle name was Denzil, and he hated the name). So what to call it..... well, the road was made of rocks, so.... Rock Road.... or more precisely, Rock Drive, because the other is an ice cream flavor.

My dad got out his tools, his mountain wood saw and some yellow paint (it had to be yellow!) and we cut an arrow out of wood, pointing the way. It was one of the few positive memories I had of my father, when he was in his garage making things. We painted it and put with large letter stencils, "ROCK DR" on it. Then came the weekend and we went down there, walked to the end of the gravel street, and nailed the sign a prominent tree.

I'd give anything to have inherited that property, as it had been laid out in my grandmother's will. But life being what it is, and after my grandfather died Mema (what I called her) couldn't take care of two houses by herself. So she put it up for sale, and some doctors from Oklahoma City came down and bought it.

Fast forward... Mema died a few years back, and her house was left to ruin. But leave it to technology today to bring windows of the past into our living rooms. It is almost taken from pages of science fiction books, like Asimov, or Arthur C. Clarke. One in particular, The Light of Other Days, is amazing in this respect. Technology was found that allowed small wormholes to be opened in space and time, so that light and sound could be transmitted from anywhere to anywhere. Thus a thousand nano-cameras were positioned above the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or followed the Republicans into the Watergate Hotel. All secrets from the past were unearthed, and honesty became the only policy. A very interesting book, to say the least.

While we don't have that ability yet, there are very large cameras in space and digital cameras here at home, and Google uses them very well. So, I was zipping around Oklahoma City on my computer, looking for addresses of houses that my Grandmother (Granny, my mom's mom) wanted to see, and the location of the Trucking company Papaw (Mema's husband) worked at...etc.... It's such a marvel to travel the roads of America without having to rent a car and pump gas. So I traveled the hour drive down to Sulphur, Oklahoma, passed the Sulphur Springs park, and followed the windy road to where our lake house was. I found it, and on Google Maps, right where our lakehouse was, I saw the words "ROCK DR." written on the screen. I went to Yahoo! maps, and it's there, too. Truly amazing. People from Sulphur, when drawing up the maps for the region, probably had no names for those streets, so when they found the street sign, they recorded it on their maps, and Google took it from there. So now that street is Rock Dr. for all the world to see. It truly made my day.

Because, while Julius Caesar and his successor Augustus named months after them, and Martin Luther King Jr. has thousands of roads named after him, it's not often that you and me can simply name something and have it be named thusly. We are not God, who could say, "You are a Giraffe," and it become thus. But I have a road that I named (well, I have a brother, and he was there, too), and it is still named that, in the maps that the whole world can see, if they know where to look.

Me on the stool.... I was, up until I moved to Georgia (read puberty) very photogenic. You can see where I get my evilness from. :)














My grandfather, Weldon Denzil Pugh, whose dream it was to have a lake house, and built the decks and lit the fireworks we shot every 4th of July in the cul-de-sac. So much fun. I wrote a poem, the only poem I've ever written that rhymed, about the Lakehouse. It's below.














The Lakehouse, with Papa and Mema standing below the back deck.

















The back deck. The side deck hadn't been built yet (other side)



















Front of the house.


















The Lakehouse

The fish drink all the water,
My Papaw would tell me
Late at night, with the moon shining bright,
On the shores of Lake Arbuckle.
He built it as a dream house,
So many years ago,
A place to stay, so far away
From diesel-engine drives down the highway.

Five o'clock in the morning,
Sitting in his kitchen chair,
Smoking cigars, humming bars,
of tunes from yesterday.

Then on the porch we'd sit,
Drinking orange juice and milk.
Watching long-legs crawl, and acorns fall
Off oak trees into the lake.

Can you throw a rock that far?
Don't the fish get full?
I asked those questions, our time passed
On the shores of Lake Arbuckle.

Commodore 64s, Mustangs, and Norman Rockwell

No, I'm not going to start waxing poetic about the ancient computers rotting away in my closet. It's odd that I should even have them. I mean, there's not much I can do with them. I have one power supply that barely works, no monitor that will work except the TV in the living room, and the disk drive loads up disks in about an hour. Plus the fact that I have all the games I love to play on the emulator programs on my ultra-fast PC computer that cost about half what my parents bought the C64 at Service Merchandise 25 years ago.

So why do I have the things? Come to think of it, why does my mom still have her 76 Mustang rotting away at the bottom of the driveway, even though some people have offered good money to take it away to restore it to its former sexy beauty (how I used to lay in the back seat while going to the doctor, throwing up, or on hot days coloring in books, only to have the crayons melt all over the back of the fold down back seats. Or looking up at the stars in the back, without seat belts, seeing stars that most people nowadays will never see because the lights are too bright and they're all inside twittering anyway.

Obviously, these material things are tied to past memories. Ones that, yeah, we could get rid of the actual things and still have those memories, but human nature just doesn't work like that. Sure, I could be Thoreau, living at his log cabin at Walden Pound, imagining the people walking around with their stuff stacked on their backs like Indian merchants who used elephants to sell their wares. There's so much stuff that we keep because there's memories that are tied to those things. Memories just aren't permanent. We need photos or movie ticket stubs, or old computers and rusty cars, or the wedding ring stuffed inside the sock drawer to remind us of those memories, both good and bad, of older times.

And while I've talked about Nostalgia many times before, there are things that I have experienced recently that show how much we try to keep the past with us. To recollect in times of peaceful contemplation. The idea of a memory restored, in the notes of a song, in the paint strokes of a master, in the rusty carcass of some old, beloved machine, now long ceasing.

Shana, one of my Facebook friends, posted a link to a Youtube video, one that has a portion of a Sesame Street song from long ago. It's easy to find, just go to Youtube and look up Vintage Sesame Street. Any one will do. Where did those old TV shows go, anyway? Now, with these days of "Reality" TV shows and endless, nauseating examples of the back-stabbing, base, immoral ways that humans treat each other. That 3 year olds probably could tell you more about MTV than PBS. Then you go on the Internet and there are, amongst the porn sites and videos of girls beating each other senseless, videos on Youtube that bring back the joy of the TV. Sesame Street, Pinwheel, the list is endless, of shows that we watched as children. And now we can enjoy them all again from Youtube or from DVDs or Hulu.com, or whereever. But what is that we would watch these silly cartoons when reality is so complex? It doesn't make any sense. Except it does, as we're not watching the shows for themselves, but as a way of remembering times when those shows were new. To experience again the quiet Saturday mornings when the TV would be on, showing cartoons, and the sunshine would come through the blinds and show up as rays bouncing off of dust. It's not the TV shows themselves, but rather the memories stored with them.

People have been doing this for centuries, even before television. In the 1800's, Britian enjoyed the landscape paintings of Mallord William Turner, who, along with Wordsworth and Colridge and others ushered in the Romantic age. The ironic thing is that, while aristocrats and art lovers gazed on at the forests and idyllic glades of Turner, the Industrial Revolution had just chopped down all of England's forests, leaving the landscape empty and barren. We only appreciate that which is being destroyed. Else, we take it for granted.

But back to TV. Recently I procured a copy of the movie Maya(1966), staring Jay North (Dennis the Menace), in an effort to get movies and shows that I had watched as a kid (and, okay, as an adult, too. :) ) I just got through watching it, and I did some research on it, as I remember seeing the TV series by the same name on TNT in the early 90's. Turns out, there were 18 episodes made of the show, filmed all in India. It enjoyed good ratings, but was canceled after only one season, because filming entirely in India was too expensive. This last chance for Jay North to continue his career was evaporated by budgeting. But anyway.... the movie is very good, one that brings out the Romance of a foreign country, wild surroundings, rogues, ruffians, snakes, tigers, elephants. It very much reminded me of the recent Secondhand Lions which was, ironically, the last movie made by Haley Joel Osment before he did his little car/pot accident thing, and succumbed to Child Actor Syndrome. Action, moral lessons, in the vein of Tom Sawyer or other adventures. But these adventures are things that children aren't experiencing anymore, since they are all inside playing their Guitar Hero, or on the Soccer field playing organized games from age 4 on up.

In this instance, childhood is very much like the landscapes that Turner made. We are destroying childhood, and so we create works of art that remind us of those days. Take the art of Norman Rockwell, or the recent flood of books, like The Dangerous Book for Boys, which teaches boys how to be boys again (there are books for girls, too, which brings up the argument of if this is all being destroyed by sexism, but that's for later). Kids are being felled by real life just as the British trees were cut down and used for mass production.

So we keep our old stuff, and watch our Youtube videos, and dream of days when things weren't so complicated, and then we go about our new-fangled lives. I guess, if keeping those old things around might get us to slow down a little, take a break, maybe it's a good thing.

Ye Ol’ Swimmin’ Hole

I've already posted, many times, about the feeling of Nostalgia. The warm feeling (with a tinge of regret) of stepping back in time to a world that is basic, more primitive (wait, don't yell about me being elitist, I used the word on purpose). And Porterdale and areas south of there are prime examples of a world that is slightly out of time with the rest of the world. And that's a good thing. It is refreshing to know that just a few miles away there is a place that has remained the quiet Georgia town where life has continued unabated for years.

I say this because today I went down to Lake Jackson, to a well known swimming hole off of Factory Shoals Road. I've been going there for years, ever since my brother's friend showed us how to get there. there's a large rock just in from the road where the river gets really deep, and you can jump off and not hit the bottom of the river. There was once a tree that overlooked the beach area, and the kids climbed up on it and jumped off into the lake part. It's been knocked down by streams and storms since I took the picture of it.

Unfortunately, the lake (river rapids...it's right on the edge of the lake becoming the Alcovy River) has suffered from the drought, and the rocks on the river are showing above the water. It's good in one since, because manuvering through the river becomes much more of a challenge, trying to keep from getting your feet (and your bag with your wallet, camera, cell phone...etc) from getting wet. A great way to exercise your mind and body at the same time.

I only hope that, with Newton County becoming one of the fastest growing areas in the country, that they will be able to keep Porterdale from exploding into a Conyers type town, filled with restaurants and Walmarts and other things that you have to drive way too far to get to and drive the smaller businesses to bankruptcy, and that they will keep the natural beauty of Lake Jackson and the Alcovy River in tact.

Above, I used the word primitive as a reference to Russeau's idea of the "Noble Savage, " a Romantic idea that makes one revere and appreciate the more un-technological way of living. It's hard for me to describe it, actually, because I almost put "uncivilized" in that last sentence. See, it's hard for our culture, as progressive as it is, as driven toward technology and electronic devices sold at any of the major chains like I described above, to appreciate the simpler life without looking at it as somehow inferior. I say this because I do not wish to itimate that I think that way. I would give up most every technological advance to live much as the people in rural towns do, to live in a small shack next to a lake and call it my own. But then, I would go crazy, and I couldn't do it. The need for Internet and cell phones and cable TV is just too much ingrained into my psyche. It's that dependency on all this commercially developed necessities makes me feel like I'm somehow weaker than my rural neighbors who might not have as much as I, but still lives their lives with comparable happiness.

But I had fun, although I didn't get to swim as much as I'd like (the beach area, in the evening, is filled with fishermen, and it's hard to swim with fishing lines whizzing over your head. And the rock area didn't have any people there, and I don't want to swim alone and get into an accident and do that whole drowning thing.) I only wish my friends could come up (or down) and see the beauty of this area for themselves.

The Rock:

The tree that was at the Beach area:

Nostalgia Part 3

Superficiality

So close to Christmas, at Borders we have Holiday music on all the time. I know that most of my co-workers can't stand it, and for the most part, only the contemporary groups like TSO or Manneheim are tolerated. And those are fine, because those groups take the idea of Christmas and the holiday season (with all the emotions that go along with it) seriously. A good blend of secular, religious, and new Christmas music that throws the unexpected in with the familiar. When you go to places like Kroger or whereever, the majority of Christmas tunes you hear come from old crooners like Perry Como or Andy Williams. We know that Bing Crosby is dreaming of a White Christmas, because somewhere on Earth that song is being played right now. So I got to thinking, why is it that, while millions of other groups can cover the old classics, that those songs being played on retail overheads are the traditional songs, with the traditional lyrics (whether or not they are the religious or merely the secular is a thought for another day), and all seamlessly brought together to bring nostalgia and delight to those shoppers who are trying to buy just the right thing for their loved ones.

And perhaps that feeling is exactly why you never hear modern day versions of Christmas classics in retail stores. Nostalgia is not brought about by Coldplay singing Chestnuts Roasting, or the Spice Girls decking the halls. It is a note, a feeling brought about by the familiarity of the old singers. A deliberately created feeling, nostalgia is. Because at this point in the year, it is the music producers that try to incorporate the old classics into holiday muzak to create the yearning for the olden days, when people could afford to get presents and the food on the table was large and home cooked (which is advantageous to grocery stores).

It sounds like I'm being cynical towards the feeling of nostalgia, and if you read my other postings on the subject, there are times when I am. But the nostalgic feelings that are real and genuine are often indistinguishable from the ones created by Hollywood or the music producers whose sole purpose is to sell products, through the TV or walking down the halls of malls throughout the land.

While I'm on the subject, I find that nostalgia is not just defined as the yearning of things past, of cultural simplicity, of children running down the dirt road playing with something without batteries. Often, nostalgia is the yearning for these things, but placed in an ideal world. Not just the past, of happier times of childhood (which, and let's face it, not everyone, or almost no one, has a happy childhood), but rather the times that we would like for that childhood to be. Sure, I never climbed a tree when I was living in Oklahoma, and while I'm not heartbroken because I didn't, there is a sense of loss that that part of my childhood was missing. This is the feeling of nostalgia, of missing things that never happened. And so when we start to think of these things, when we get nostalgic, it is obviously the parts of our childhood that we never got to fulfill that makes wish we could go back and relive those times. That is nostalgia. And it's depressing, but it's often a sweet sadness. It is pain and pleasure all rolled into one. Just like most emotions; you can't have one without the other.

The group Counting Crows said:

"The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings."

I think he said it right.

Nostalgia, Part 2

My stepfather used to drive an ice cream truck, and so a couple of times he let me come along with him as he made his rounds. There was such a feeling of wonder as we drove through the neighborhoods in Conyers, delivering ice cream to the low socioeconomic areas, knowing that the money the parents were giving the kids may have been much better used toward electricity or water. The money was used to buy a moment of happiness to the kids, and while in the past I have criticized materialism and buying love, in this instance I do think that happiness through an ice cream sandwich and a trucking ringing a bell and chugging down the road is worth it.

And as we were driving down the barely drivable road in the trailer park, I noticed that these children, mostly without AC or TV or cable or internet or whatever, played and developed and adapted, and were happy. Much happier than the suburban rich people that wind up shooting people in schools. Although I know that I could not assess the happiness of the kids in the trailer park just by one glance, I had a certain feeling of longing toward the simplicity of life that they were experiencing. Of course I know that's wrong, that they might have had to deal with things that no child should have to deal with, and that the idea of the child in the trailer park is similar to that of Russeau and his "noble savage" idea. I am a Romantic at heart, and so while I live in the 21st century in a world of technology, I long for a time more recognizable to someone like Thoreau.

If you really want to understand what I'm talking about, read Ray Bradbury's work Dandelion Wine. It's a work of pure nostalgia, and the lyricism of the language lifts that life right off the page and makes the modern world disappear. Nostalgia is such a complex emotion, because while the pleasure of thinking about living in a somewhat fictional world where things are more simple, there is also the realization that those people had to deal with hardships that our modern technologies have done away with. Some diseases, electricity, running water, bathrooms inside the house.... but also things that are not so obvious, such as having to write everything by hand, or being able to look up anything via the internet and have a decent chance of actually finding what you're looking for in about 5 minutes or less. And then there's the boredom, which is two fold, because while it did exist in "olden" times, there were always things to do, either because of endless chores (clothes and dishes had to be hand washed), or by using your imagination and play games with whatever you had around the house (unlike now, when you buy your games for the Xbox or whatever).

So when we yearn for simpler times, when we wax nostalgic, we also are admitting that those times are gone, and that something precious that we had is now lost to us. Whether it's the natural progressiveness of society, or some memory of childhood we long to regain, we have changed the way we live. The interesting thing about that is that often times, nostalgia looks back through rose-colored glasses. We see all the good times without seeing the bad. And it's painful, in some cases, to see what we have lost and then have to accept those losses, almost like losing a loved one, except it is part of ourselves that we have lost. But there still is hope that those times that we yearn for can still be recaptured, in the children that we see playing ball on the street corner, in the look on their faces as we give them ice cream from a truck with an antique bell on top, in the small towns that have somehow escaped the interstates and highways that bring such speed to modern life. Would that today's children have to claim such memories before they can move on to the world of TV and online gaming. But, I am afraid, that that childhood is rapidly disappearing (see earlier blogs), an we are becoming a society of all one memory, all one society. I am afraid that soon, the swimming holes will be empty, and the swing of bats in neighborhoods will soon fall silent. Let us hope that, in the future, when our children are studying algebra and engineering in elementary school, when school becomes something you do in front of a screen, that sometime, those children wander outdoors and unplug themselves for a moment from computers and ipods and cell phones, and find joy in the simpler things.

Nostalgia, or Life without Electricty

It was Turner, the famous British Landscape painter, who brought the forests of England, as well as the rest of Europe, into favor with the art scene during the late 1700's. Without his influence, artists like Monet and Caspar David Friedrich would not have recieved the high praise for simple paintings of scenery. But the need for landscape scenes in England during this time was important for more than just art. It was a symbol of the vanishing forests of England, that were being replaced by factories and the Industrial Revolution.

My point is that the most popular art exists when the objects that are being painted are being destroyed. Currently, impressionist paintings are among the most prevalent posters found in dorm rooms today (aside from scantily clad women). We find beauty in landscapes found in Alaska or Montana because, for the most of us, we have never seen such beauty. For the people living in urban areas, especially here in the south, mountains and snow are only seen on TV and on the paintings in stores. Further, one of the most popular new videos for the Christmas holiday is the video Yule log, since most people now living in urban areas have no fireplaces, they must make do with an electronic one.

Perhaps this is one reason why bluegrass music is just as popular today as it was in times past. It is why places like Williamsburg and Stone Mountain exist and thrive, because the yearning for the earlier, simpler times pervade into our consciousness. We want to slow down, to become like our grandparents and our ancestors. Of course, we would not want to give up our modern luxuries, but at the same time, a log cabin someplace far away would be ideal for most of us, if even for a few days or so. I've often admired a log fishing cabin on Highway 212 going to Milledgeville as a great place for me to live if I ever had more money than I knew what to do with. It's right on the banks of Lake Sinclair, and it probably costs a bundle (but of course, that's why we value it so much, because the dreams of the people with money to be able to get away from everything for a few days is often overwhelming. If I had a simple cabin next to a lake, with a simple T1 line to access the Internet :), that would be everything I need.

I'm talking about Nostalgia. The yearning for simpler times that have been destroyed by modern day society. And it's in line for capitalism to do this, because then they can offer islands of simple bliss far away from society for outrageous amounts of money. And of course these places are far away from cities, so that you have to drive for hours to get there, which then it's necessary to have a car and to put lots of gas into said car. This is capitalism at it's finest, and this is also what OSC was talking about in that blog I referenced to earlier. The perfect example is Reynolds Plantation on Lake Oconee. Houses that cost millions of dollars, an hour away from Atlanta, and no nothing for miles. But to live on a lake in the middle of nowhere, that would be the life. Of course the houses have to be mansions with cable and internet and cell phones and stuff, instead of the fishing cabins I would be happy with.

Of course, Nostalgia isn't a bad thing totally. I was getting all the cynicism out of the way. There is something very peaceful about nostalgia, in the music, in the writings, in the paintings. I have often found such peace in the songs of Michael Nesmith, as well as the writings of Henry David Thoreau. a good book for younger kids is Gary Paulsen's The Island. There are so many wonderful works of art, music, and books, that give a sense of Nostalgia, but nothing like actually going to the small towns in America and seeing how people used to live, and in some cases, still live today. I was watching a TV show on PBS that talked about the unusual side-of-the-road architechture in small town America. It made me smile, and laugh, and wish that I was working in some local bookstore in DeepStep, Georgia, because I feel there's something missing in today's world that existed in great abundance in the times of my grandparents.

I remember walking down the neighborhood of my youth, Rolling Green, and seeing no one out, even though it was a warm summer day, and realizing that everyone was inside playing video games, or out playing one of the myriad of soccer games that were scheduled every day of the year. No time to actually get out and be kids. I enjoy even today going over to Factory Shoals Park in Newton Co. near Lake Jackson and going to the swimming hole there. It's such a refreshing change of pace. But for the most part, most kids nowadays will never know those pleasures. They will be whisked away to arranged sports games to play dates where the main focus will be some sort of electronic diversion, or they will spend hours in front of the TV playing their Wiis or their PS3s. And I'm just as guilty as they are. We should all spend time without electricity, and see what our imaginations will think of to keep us happy. People would be happier doing this than what they think.