Some sort of emotional fender-bender
It started yesterday when I nearly cried during a preview for an Ashton Kutcher/Amanda Peet movie. Maybe it started before that, when I was thinking about my 85th birthday party. I planned a bike ride with my family and neighbors in my groovy living community. No flying cars for us, it was back to basics on a beautiful sunny day in 2063. Then I was forced to imagine it without my family and I realized that optimism is a lot easier from 58 years away.

Today it’s this.(Thanks, Rob.) I feel like I’ve lost another little piece of my past. It feels a little selfish for me to whine about the death of a man I never spoke with. It is. a little selfish. But I’m going to do it anyway, because there are times when I feel like little pieces are just chipping away from my life all the time. Memories get fuzzier. Yesteryear gets grander, today is not quite so golden. There’s no one to blame but me. Five years from now this will be the time of my life, or else I’ll be on the cusp of something really big. Why not now? Let go of the pizza places of the past and their eccentric parking attendants. Embrace the Potbelly of today. There are crazy guys all over this city and if I want one, I’m sure I could go out and find one. I didn’t want one when I was in C-town, why do I miss him now? With no offense intended to his memory or his family, what am I really losing? What have I really lost? A tiny piece of the human embodiment of a memory of a place that I didn’t even frequent all that much when you consider how ridiculously close I lived to it. Yet, I’m sad, like I’ve lost something important to me. It’s worse than “lost,” it’s losing. It’s this slippery slope of memory and I can’t control it. It’s tumbling away.

There are days that I make new memories. Days that I make new friends, but the intensity of the past isn’t there. The intensity of the past wasn’t at school either. The intensity of the past is always past. So why does it seem to linger so much in my present?

This 85th birthday. Living communities are the wave of the next 50 years. It’s what we’re lacking, isn’t it? That community? Those people who were like family even though they don’t share your blood. Small towns will rise again. People will seek connection instead of refuge. Or they won’t and they’ll sit around and pontificate to the emptiness of the Internet and remember the wonders of long ago. They’ll remember a time no one quite remembers and dream of a time they can’t quite forget.