Tag Archives: pointless nostalgia

Parental Guidance, Pointless Nostalgia

Senior Moments at Junior High

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My daughter’s kindergarten is part of a small school that does not yet have its own building. Their classrooms are wedged into one section of a junior high. This provides an interesting contrast every morning as I walk her to school. My daughter is still very excited about the idea of Big Kid School. She’s learning to read and making new friends and bringing books home from the library and even jazzed about cafeteria food.

And as she tells me about all the wonderful new things she loves and wants to shout out to the world, I must wade through a sea of junior high kids who hate life. They loiter in the schoolyard, the nearby sidewalks, the local delis, they give off a pungent scent of man, fuck this. And also hairspray.

Junior high was the absolute, rock-bottom worst. I have never met a single person who did not feel this way. (If you do, please, tell me about your magical native land of unicorns and leprechauns.) I don’t know how it was in your neck of the woods, but for me, the worst thing about junior high was how brutally different it was from elementary school, how there was absolutely no transition between the two. One day I was quoting Monty Python with impunity, the next…well, the next day I was still doing it, but now I was made fully aware of just how weird this was.

Seeing these junior high kids every morning is a painful reminder of this time and how awful it is for everyone. I feel immensely sorry for them, when I don’t want to throttle them for standing eight across right in front of the school’s only entrance, or running into traffic because they think it’s funny.

I feel like my junior high years were worse than most. Not really because of anything horrible that happened to me–on the continuum of junior high experiences, mine were at average horror levels–but because of the institutional gloom that hung over me then. The building I had to go to every day was my district’s huge, ancient schoolhouse, built in days of yore when my town was tiny and it only took one brick manse to house every single grade, K-12. As the district grew over the decades, new elementary and high school buildings were erected, leaving behind this funhouse to function as the junior high. You could not have picked a better place to emphasize just how awful this time is in everyone’s life.

It was constructed during an era where light and joy were considered luxuries. The hallways–particularly the ones where all the lockers were located–were incredibly dark. Decrepit lightbulbs hung from too-high ceilings, but when they were turned on they somehow managed to make the corridors darker, as if the photons they emitted were encrusted with soot. And the less said about the bathrooms, the better. It was soil fertile for mischief, where those inclined to evil could emerge from nowhere as you shuttled between classes, ruin your day, and quickly disappear into the shadows.

I caught onto to this very quickly, around the time some douche attempted to dump a Ziploc bag of pencil shavings on my head as I committed the crime of retrieving books from my locker. (I saw my would-be assailant coming from a mile away. In a ninja move I’m still proud of, I waited until he was extremely close and just about to tip the bag over, then reached up and tilted it back in his face.) So I made it my mission to spend as little time in the hallways as possible. I would carry as many books with me as I could stand, leave a class the nanosecond the bell rang, and speed to the next one. My friends called me Matt-Man, because they’d turn to talk to me when class was over and I’d be gone like The Dark Knight.

Old habits die hard. While walking with my daughter in the morning, once I neared the school’s block, the one with a million loitering newly-minted teens, I would begin to speed up. I’d find any tiny crevice between two kids, even if I had to turn sideways to fit. Anything that would to get me to my destination a little faster, just like I did in my junior high days. Only instead of lugging six classes’ worth of books, this time I was towing a four-year-old who wants to know why I’m running.

It took me a few weeks to notice I was doing this, and understand why I was doing it. One morning, I stopped myself and made a conscious effort to take it slow. In doing so, I realized most of these junior high kids were tiny and, although almost uniformly annoying, not in the least bit terrifying. It made me mad at my young self. Was I afraid of kids like these? If so, what was wrong with me? I bet I could pick up any of them by the scruffs of their necks. Hell, I could pick up two, one in each hand. It took every ounce of willpower I had to not do just that.

I have a habit of walking way faster than I need to in general. When strolling with others, I will constantly find myself half a block ahead of my companions. A few weeks ago, I was visiting New Orleans for the first time in years, and me and a friend took a stroll through the French Quarter. “Why are you rushing?” my friend asked. I had no conscious idea I was doing this, but something within me says that walking too slow is a dangerous move.

It’s partially due to years of urban living, but I have to think that the junior high experience is a factor as well. My innate impulse to get places faster goes back to the days when I was convinced that I was a shark who had to keep moving forward or perish, or at least get a head full of pencil shavings. In the post-junior high years, friends would say I stomped. I wanted to protest otherwise, but the frequency with which I wear through shoes backs them up. I also blame this on the days when I felt I had to scale the stairs of this horrible building as quickly as possibly, two steps at a time, three if I could manage it. Since then, I haven’t been able to step lightly, even if I try.

Of course, if someone had told me Don’t be afraid of these wimps; they’re just as fucked up as you right now when I was in junior high, that would’ve done me no bit of good. No amount of reasoning would have changed my idea of what was VERY IMPORTANT when I was 13. Just like when I tell my daughter that it’s not worth throwing a fit because I told her she can’t have candy for breakfast, or because the cable On Demand is broken and won’t allow her to watch Adventure Time. Some things you can’t be talked out of; you simply have to live through them and laugh them off later.

Or keep running for the rest of your life. You know, whichever.

Pointless Nostalgia

Choose Your Own Traumatic Adventure

Sometimes I use this site to write about painful memories. I find it’s cheaper than therapy and less habit forming than medication (though just barely). That’s not to put down anybody who needs either (or both) of those things to deal with whatever requires dealing with in their lives. I just find that tapping it out on a computer works best for me. Writing is the medium in which I express myself the best. If I could sculpt or paint or interpretive dance better than I can write, I’d do it one of those ways. But I don’t, so here we are.

For a long time, I exclusively wrote funny-ha-ha stuff here (or tried to, anyway). Whenever I considered writing about Deep Things, I feared coming across as one of those precious kids you’d hear in freshman composition class, pouring out their soul about the ordeal of having a vaguely distant father, because my trauma is SO important, the WORLD needs to hear about it and share my pain.

I can’t say when or why I changed my mind about that, really, but at some point I discovered that this site gives me the means to lay those memories out and defang them by transmogrifying a tale of woe into a humorous anecdote. Or at the very least, finding some humor to extract from it, usually at my own expense.

I’ve come to believe that in most instances of non-physical trauma, how much damage you suffer from it is largely up to you. Yes, horrible people can say horrible things to make you feel horrible, especially when you’re a kid and don’t quite know how to handle it. But we all grow up (unless you live in Williamsburg), and at some point in your life you have a choice. You can hang on to the pain forever and let it eat at you like an untreated wound, or you can slough it off in some way–such as, say, writing about it–and let the spot heal.

I’ve chosen the latter. In examining many of these incidents with the remove of time, the thing I find the most funny is the one thing I could have changed–namely, how I reacted to them and held on to the anger for way too long, thus giving a lot of power to people and things that didn’t really deserve it.

[I also now take a kind of perverse pleasure in careening wildly between straight-up silly posts and serious ones on Scratchbomb. Like this site has become my personal episode of M*A*S*H and I am Hawkeye. One second I’m wearing an arrow through my head and the next I’m standing over a dead soldier muttering, “When will the killing end?!”]

Continue reading Choose Your Own Traumatic Adventure →

Pointless Nostalgia

Gangly Limbs Contorted, We Move Forward

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A few weekends ago, I was at my mother’s house and saw 500 Days of Summer for the first time. I found it alternately enjoyable and infuriating (just a tad too twee at times for my taste, like much indie-ish film fare), but stuck with it the whole way. The one scene that stuck with me was where the main characters are at a park, and Joseph Gordon Levitt starts doodling on Zooey Deschanel’s arm with a pen. It stuck with me because the pen he was using was the exact same one my father used for his crossword puzzles. A black Pilot with a thin plastic yellow top on the cap. I realized all at once that I was once surrounded by these pens, and that I hadn’t seen one since he died, to the point that I’d thought Pilot stopped production on them because he accounted for a large percentage of their sales. (They managed to soldier along without him, it turns out.)

My father had tons of these black pens, and their red brethren. When he did a New York Times crossword puzzle, he would write a letter in each space with his black pen in this italic, almost calligraphic script, where each character would have at least one open space. For instance, a “T” would have a very wide, outlined vertical base, topped by a flat horizontal line. At some point in the puzzle completion process, he would fill in these empty spaces with the red pen.

I’m not sure why he did this, if it was something he imitated or came up with his own. I’m not sure at what point in the puzzle completion process he would fill in each black letter with red–was it when he was sure of an answer, or just when he remembered to do it? Just a few of many questions it never occurred to me to ask when I might have been able to get answers.

This is the time of year when I think about my father. It’s also the time of year when I seem to be forcibly reminded of him by random encounters. I don’t think it’s anything cosmic, really; when you’re attuned to something, you’re bound to notice it more than usual, like when you first learn a word and suddenly it seems to appear in everything you read.

Last week on a lunch break–a rare one where I actually left the office–I found myself along a stretch of Sixth Avenue where I hardly ever go anymore. On my way back to the office, I passed by the Waverly Diner. My dad loved this place, and would all but demand we eat there when we would meet for lunch while I was going to NYU. Maybe because it was the kind of old school diner that’s harder and harder to find in the city, waiters in uniforms, cramped booths with coat racks, the ability to make decent stuffed mushrooms. He also had a soft spot for the Cafe Edison off of Times Square; much for the same reasons, I imagine. It’s a diner tucked away into a hotel lobby that you could never find unless you knew it was there.

Unfortunately, when I passed the Waverly, its windows were all taped up with pale beige butcher’s paper. I thought the place was closed, and my heart sank. As it turned out, the Waverly was simply being renovated. I stole a quick peek through the half-cracked front door. There was nothing inside but large, idle tools and sheetrock dust. That was almost worse than it being gone forever. More than once over the past few years, I’ve had this thought that I should go have lunch there on my father’s behalf. Now I can’t, even when the Waverly opens, because it will not be the Waverly he loved. Realizing this filled me with a very deep sense of failure.

And almost simultaneously, I experienced another event that filled me with–well, not pride. Maybe more like Bart Simpson’s “Not-Shame” he briefly felt for Homer. A while ago, I bought the entire Monty Python series on DVD because Amazon had it on sale for a criminally cheap amount. It arrived and sat atop my cable box for months, because I realized I’d burnt myself out these shows a long time ago and had no burning desire to watch them again, which was a depressing revelation (though not nearly as depressing as it would have been if I’d paid full price).

Then, a week or two ago, The Kid (cannot call her The Baby anymore, sadly) noticed the box set and its colorful illustrations, and said out of nowhere, “I wanna watch that!” I tried to dissuade her at first. Obviously, an almost-kindergarten-aged kid isn’t going to understand the vast majority of Monty Python’s humor, and there’s some bits you’d prefer they not understand. But I wasn’t all that much older than her when I saw Monty Python for the first time, thanks to my dad’s religious watching of it on PBS. (Not that I really got most of what I saw either.)

So I made a few judicious choices. I showed her some of the Terry Gilliam cartoons, which she loved as much as I did when I was a kid. And I showed her the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch, which she has now demanded to rewatch almost every day since. Her Nerdening is nearly complete, if it wasn’t already. Seeing Monty Python with her (even in bite-sized chunks) felt a lot like taking her to a ballgame, like seeing something I love through the eyes of someone experiencing it for the first time.

And I also realized that the reason I don’t watch Monty Python anymore–other than the fact that I watched every single episode a katrillion times in high school–is that when I watch it, I hear my father imitating all the best lines. Long after my daughter had scampered out of the living room, I sat and watched the “Piranha Brothers” sketch for the first time in years, and all I could hear in my head was his mimicking of Michael Palin as an East End housewife (“Kids were different back then. They didn’t have their ‘eads filled up with all this Cartesian dualism…”) and John Cleese as Dinsdale Piranha’s paramour (“What’s more, he knew how to treat a female impersonator.”).

This morning, while waiting for the bus, I slipped in my iPod headphones and hit “shuffle.” I will swear on the holy book of your choice that the first two songs it spit out where these:

So there I’m standing at the bus stop, trying to hold it together, and I suddenly remember that my dad didn’t even like music. He owned one album of doo-wop songs; every other record in his collection was comedy, Tom Lehrer, George Carlin. He’d listen to classical music on WQXR while doing work, but it was all background to him. And I’m ready to lose it listening to an art form he didn’t even like.

It’s strange, almost unfair, to feel my father’s absence so profoundly when he took almost nothing seriously. It feels like an ironic curse, like a glutton having his mouth sewn shut. And yet, this time of year, I have this crushing weight on me of someone who was light as air. The only explanation I have for it is the way he died, and my role in that.

I wrote this last year, on the fifth anniversary of his death. Today, it’s six years, and I feel almost exactly the same way now as I did when I wrote it. I imagine I’ll feel the same way 20 years from now, 50 years from now, whenever. Which is to say, the absolute worst feeling a nerd like me can have: I know little about him and will, in all likelihood, never know more.

I can only grasp at pens and diners and hope that something of him–the best parts of him–lives on when my daughter laughs at John Cleese whipping his gangly legs down a London sidewalk. Six years later, I still feel like he looks in that sketch: Stoic, teeth gritted, barely in control of my extremities, but moving forward nonetheless.