From78

Looking back at what I’ve posted and podcasted about recently, I see a theme of me now looking back on the young me and seeing him as rather judgmental. What’s interesting about this is that I now see myself then as judgmental, which is a judgment.

What should I make of catching myself judging a younger version of myself for being judgmental?

When I think about it right now, I see a fundamental difference. The way I remember it, the young me was very sure of his judgments. Additionally, the young me felt rather righteous and self-important.

I still judge (obviously). I can’t get divorced from making judgments all the time about everything.

However, I hope I’m much more prone to questioning my judgments and less quick to trust them. I also hope I don’t take myself as seriously as I did in my younger years, because it seems to me that taking oneself seriously breeds feelings of self-righteousness and self-importance, which in turn lead to impulsive, often regretful actions.

Yesterday, I saw someone wearing a baggy black sweater and distressed jeans. This put my brain gremlins to work. They pulled several files into my consciousness.

The files contained many memories of being with friends at a small café and/or at Denny’s in the mid-1990s. In these memories, it was winter, and indoor spaces were filled with cigarette smoke. (This was when people could still smoke indoors.) Lots of people were dressed in a style that was similar to the person I had just seen. This was the height of the grunge era, and many people dressed in baggy sweaters, flannel shirts, jeans, and well-worn footwear to show how aligned they were with the fashion zeitgeist of the time.

The memory fades, and I start to think about it.

I notice a few things:

I notice that at this point in my life, when I look back to the 1990s, I see a lot of struggle. I was struggling. Many of the other people around me were struggling as well. We were young and had not established ourselves professionally or economically. We were living our lives in a space between our families of origin and the families we would create, a liminal zone where friendships and community serve as a kind of family structure, even though there are no ties of marriage or genetics binding people together. We didn’t know much about ourselves or the world we lived in. (At the time, many of the people I hung out with and I would not have admitted to this. We were prone to presenting ourselves as people who did know who and what we were because we were authentic and had yet to be corrupted by an accumulation of experiences that would beat us down and blunt our young jagged edges.)

As I savored these associations, a new thought came to me: I was struggling, and those around me were struggling, but we were struggling together. That shared struggle is something I long for as I look back on it.

Past me who lives in my perks up.

“You think struggle is desirable? You think my struggle is quaint? Fuck you!” The version of past me that lives in my head says to me now. Past me, the one who lives in my head, wants to punch me now in the face. Hard.

“Hold up,” I say to past me. “I know… well… I remember how hard this feels for you. I don’t miss that feeling. You probably won’t believe me because you feel so alone, isolated, and misunderstood, but many people around you are going through their own version of this. You hang out with them often. Even though you can’t see it when you’re going through the struggle, there is a collective aspect to this, along with the singular aspect that is yours alone.”

Past me makes an obscene gesture. He wants none of what I’m saying.

From a New York Times article on the writing of the French writer

In exploring his own consciousness, he seems also to explore ours.

This is what I hope I’m doing a version of with From 78.

BeforeI had kids, I would get annoyed at how people with kids reacted to cold and flu season.

Simply put: I thought they were treating a time of year when many people had to deal with an inconvenient transitory illness like a bigger deal than it was.

Today, I’ve got four kids, the oldest is close to seven and the youngest not much over one year old. And everyone in the house has a cold.

Not COVID, RSV, strep, or the flu. Just a cold.

Having a cold makes everything even the most mundane task of daily life (sleeping, moving, talking, etc.) go from things that I don’t need to think about to things that require noticeable mental and physical effort.

When it was just me who had to endure this rottenness, it was uncomfortable, but it was definitely bearable. This is probably why I thought that people with kids were overreacting to cold flu season before I had kids. I was was assuming that my subjective experience of discomfort and difficulties that are part of being sick were representative of what they would be going through.

Now, as I experience having to deal with

1. my own sickness induced discomfort and
2. how my kid’s sickness induced discomfort (which makes them act in ways that are not fun)

I realize how sawfly cold and flu season is for people with kids! Having to manage the discomfort of others makes my discomfort become far more uncomfortable.

It also makes me more aware of something I talk about in my podcast —how getting older (and more experienced) has made me far less judgmental than when I was young (and less experienced).

From the film Winter in Sokcho (2024) on Mubi.

Time is so cruel. It slips through your fingers like an eel.

Yeah!

When I read these words on the screen while watching the film (with English subtitles), I paused the movie to contemplate what they conveyed.

My reverie brought up thoughts about how, nowadays, I sometimes consider starting something and decide not to because I know I won’t have time to see it through to the end.

(Recent example: Starting a long book, trying to learn a new language, & cleaning out the storage room in my basement.)

I don’t think this happened to me when I was younger, or if it did, it didn’t happen as often as it does now. The reason for this: when I was young, I could honestly tell myself I had a lot more free time and a lot more tomorrows… Saying “I’ll do X later” or “I’ll get to X tomorrow” wasn’t necessarily a lie.

Now, experience has taught me that whenever I think I’ll get to something later or tomorrow, I quickly realize that’s probably not true. I recognize that sentiment as an appealing fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. I’ve come to really experience, acknowledge, and know that time slips through my fingers like an eel.

Looking out the window at the cold slowly day outside brought up many memories of days like this when I was young.

The clearest memories were from when I was a student at a community college who would go to Borders Books, Misic, & Cafe to study… and (rather often) avoid studying by reading things that had nothing to do with my studies.

I found it interesting to notice/pay attention to what it felt like to remember these days from the past in my present.

What stood out was the feeling of wanting to be someplace warm, with a book, in close proximity to (but not talking to) other oeople.

This feeling that was invoked as I stood inside a warm place and looked out into a cold snowy outside, and it was the same feeling today as it was some 20 years (!) back.

The feeling is a bridge, a connection between me then and me now, between an affective experience then and now.

It’s a cold wet Sunday evening here in the American Midwest as I write these words. I’ve had my kids (ages 6, 4, 2, & 1) inside for most of the day. This is not an ideal situation.

One thing I’ve figured out is that unspent energy goes through some sort of change around 4:00 pm, where it becomes manic-crazy-in-your-face-energy. This is the kind of energy that leads to a high likelihood of something double-plus-unfold happening.

(Other parents: have you noticed this too, or is this something unique to my family?)

So, I need something I can do with the kids. It can’t last long. It has to be free or very low cost.

My first bet was the library, but it closes early on Sunday. By the time I got them there we’d have to turn around and leave fairly quickly. So, that was out.

I consist putting on a video of some sort, but kids programming is psychological warfare against adults. I don’t think it’s great for kids either, but unlike adults, they tend to like it…. And a video won’t really burn off the unspent energy, and will make bedtime more difficult.

Then I remembered that there is a small indoor play place at the nearby McDonald’s.

There was a time I looked down on McDonald’s. I don’t anymore. The main reason for this shift was coming across the work of Chris Arnade, who convinced me that in many places, McDonald’s is an institution that is a sort of community center. This is most noticeable in places where good park districts and good library sbranches are absent.

I thought about Arnade, and the mind changing work he’s done this evening, as I watched my kids climb and play off some of their unspent energy.

I don’t have a big point to make behind this.

Hello,

This is the second field note I’ve recorded and posted to the new From78 site (hosted via Micro.blog). I used a small wireless mic and my iPhone’s voice memo app to make the field note. If it sounds good, I plan to do more things like this.

The idea is to record stuff in the fly, as a kind of field note. Then, later, use those off the cuff field recordings as source material for a From78 podcast.