Tag: nostalgia
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Strange Nostalgia for Lost Electronics
I get a lot of shit for the “museum of obsolete technology” I have in our storage locker right now, the electronic toys I’m paying $30 a month to not see. But I’ve pared down almost all of that inventory now, and it’s down to a single C-64 and 1541 drive, and a Sony Magic…
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Rare reports of tongue discoloration
I’m sick. Strep throat. It happened suddenly, this urge to drink a gallon of water every five minutes, then a difficulty swallowing. I didn’t wait for it to play out, and got in to a doctor right away. They’ve had so many cases of adult strep throat, they were out of the test kits, and…
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Desks, a viewport into the mind
As a writer, I spend a lot of time at desks. And I have some strange obsession with the workspaces of writers, which is why I always seem to be snapping pictures of my desks. And every time I go back and look at it, I can tell the era and the project and the…
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A cautionary tale of incompatible formats
In 1998, I got a new credit card in the mail and after thinking about how many photocopies I could make for $1500 or if that was enough to buy like one sixtyfourth of an acre in some deserted forest, enough to build some kind of treehouse-esque unabomber shack, I suddenly realized that I had…
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Cash for gold city
I mentioned before that my great Midwestern tour this holiday season was a two-parter. We spent a week in Wisconsin with Sarah’s family, which I’ve done every year for I think five years now. But this time we also took a few more days and drove out to Indiana to see my family. I haven’t…
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Leaving home
Yesterday marks the 20th anniversary of when I packed up my dad’s truck and left Elkhart for Bloomington to start my freshman year at IU. Twenty years. Two decades. It’s a hard number for me to wrap my mind around. And this is the part where I’m supposed to say it just feels like yesterday,…
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20 years does change people
(A side note: my elbow is rapidly healing. I still have a fiberglass cast, but the doctor has me spending less time in it, and I anticipate being back to my two-handed typing and right-handed mousing within a week or so. I’m enjoying such an input method as we speak, but I don’t think I’d…
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Sentimentality time-suck
Nostalgia has been such an overruling force in my internal dialogue lately. I think part of it is that I never feel like I’m doing anything in the moment I’m in, but much later, I idealize that piece of my past. I wrote Summer Rain in an overwhelming fit of nostalgia for my time in…
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414 S. Mitchell
I know I just talked about the folly of nostalgia, but the other night I found myself googling my old address on Mitchell Street in Bloomington. Long-time readers (both of you) know that 414 S. Mitchell was my home base from 1991-1993, and also the backdrop of my first book, Summer Rain. Anyway, I found…
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Ralph’s charged particles
I was at Ralph’s yesterday. Ralph’s is a grocery store, and it turns out it’s part of the Kroger empire, but nonetheless it is a huge and fancy grocery store, and that’s saying a lot because it appears to me that southern California takes their grocery stores very seriously, and even the shitty places have…