BUNDLES
I really, truly thought I was done worrying about Nuclear War after my teens. Nuclear War was an 80s thing.
One of the most convenient things about being born at the dawn of a decade (aside from the easy math when it comes to determining what age I was when something happened or what age I’ll be when some hypothetical event occurs in the future) is the tendency to tie up the long stretches of time between the rollovers of the first digit on my chronometer into tight, easy bundles of history and culture. I don’t know if it’s that simple with everyone else, but being born in 1970 always felt like a little gift that way. Each decade had a specific palette of events and sense memories, filtered through my age at the time.
The 70s smelled like cigarettes. Tasted like Pepsi. Lots of earth tones. Sofas were scratchier. Most of the network TV shows seemed to take place out west, either in the Rocky Mountains or what I now recognize as the San Fernando Valley. There were vestiges of leftover 60s counterculture around the margins of my life, mostly confined to Public Television- the vaguely folksy animation on Sesame Street, Morgan Freeman’s “Easy Reader” character on The Electric Company, and the unmistakable whiff of granola and carob when channel 16 was left on long enough to segue into Lilias,Yoga and You or Crockett’s Victory Garden. Muhammad Ali and Davey Concepción and Billie Jean King and Lee Majors. The Fonz, abdicating his throne of Unassailable Cool to Han Solo after one fateful afternoon in the Salem Mall Cinema. Long, hazy, Band-aid-ridden summer days, bathed in the sweat of an active kid too young to be bound to the bathing schedule of puberty. Blizzard-filled winters spent in wet wool, squeaking rubber, and the man-made vrooosh of nylon. I was vaguely aware of the energy crisis, and would later learn just how utterly batshit crazy the decade was, what with all the hijackings and bombings and general revolution, but the 70s for me was mostly just Childhood, as it ideally should be for anyone in their first ten years of life.
The 80s- and, consequently, my teen years- were louder. They started muted, mere echoes of the 70s, but became steadily more garish, culminating in a fugue state of day-glo and fizz. A lot of the early part of the decade seemed to happen at night, by the light of video game screens and to the soundtrack of the Godfather’s Pizza jukebox, but a bright, beachy, sunbaked patina later took over as the years piled on. It was, in a way, a perfect decade to be a teenager, full of shiny distractions and music coated in a hard candy shell of frosty treble, pretending to be profound but ultimately profoundly shallow, and all competing for my first pittances of disposable income. I gradually began shedding my innocence as more worldly concerns started looming on the horizon. Relatives started to pass away. I became more aware of the news. The Challenger explosion, broadcast in real time on our classroom TVs. The Day After and general Cold War dread. Driver’s Ed. The hormonal Molotov cocktail of adolescence, and the untraceable, unaimed and unaimable angst that comes with it. My first two years of high school, wishing I had the courage to grow my hair out, but instead taking the questionable route of dressing as dorky as humanly possible and choosing “zany” as my central personality trait, all the while absolutely crippled by my crush on the unattainable Lori Waitzman (two years older, head cheerleader, dating the quarterback…it was hopeless). My childhood obsession with airplanes turned into a teenage love affair with the guitar. I soured on organized religion right around the same time, after my first run in with attempted evangelical brainwashing in my Methodist youth group (one bullet dodged, at least). The decade ended with me, besotted with Rock & Roll, struggling through the mullet stage of rock god hair farming, rejecting my previous plans of a career as a fighter pilot and wading deeper and deeper into the waters of Bohemia, winding up in that evergreen refuge of 60s British guitar heroes and other aimless cultural refugees: Art School.
The 90s? In a word, transformative. It was my 20s, after all- my metamorphosis into Adulthood. In the spring of 1990, my two-year scholarship at Columbus College of Art & Design ran out, and my subsequent transfer to Sinclair Community College confirmed my growing suspicion that the life of a commercial artist was not for me. I wanted to be a musician and, since I had no real education in that world beyond dabbling in a few casual groups in high school and college, I created my own curriculum, essentially committing myself to a series of dead-end day-labor jobs that would keep my nights and weekends free and pay for guitar strings. I got an apartment in THE BIG CITY (Dayton, Ohio), lived at or near the poverty line, played in my first serious band, and finally started writing songs. Aside from my first real romantic heartbreak, the 90s were probably the happiest time of my life, and a sizable part of me is still living there, wearing flannel, smelling like coffee and incense, and finding refuge in the sanctuary of music. I figured out who I was in the 90s. I got my first tattoo. I did my first tour. Recorded albums. Developed and embraced my worldview as an increasingly left-leaning secular humanist. Met my wife (take that, Lori Waitzman!). Not much intrinsically has changed since then, other than my hair color, my weight, and the amount of guitars in the house. I mostly missed out on Seinfeld and Friends and a lot of the other pop culture touchstones of the era because I was so busy gigging, or practicing, or watching my friends gigging or practicing. No regrets, really.
My busyness continued as my 20s turned into my 30s in 2000 and the 20-Aughts were a long string of gigs and projects, punctuated by major milestones like getting married in ‘07 and the hope and optimism of Obama’s inauguration, as well cataclysmic events like 9/11, continuing the streak of unending, dirty little wars and conflicts that replaced the Cold War and will probably still be going on long after I’m gone.
It’s such a strange thing, the way that time speeds up as you get older, and the older I get, the harder it is to tie those decades up into tidy bundles. The first half of the 20-Teens were, quite frankly, a blur for me; my musical life had shifted into an even higher gear, and between the relentless weekend-warrior touring I was doing with two different groups coupled in an uneasy, oil-and-water mixture with the construction job I was holding down during the week, I was half insane with exhaustion. As a result, I can’t really pin any given event to any given year. Did it happen in 2011? 2014? 2017? No clue. Reply hazy. Ask again later.
Which brings us up to now: the era of Dorito Mussolini. Covid. Social media. AI. Oligarchy. The compromising of Art. The regimen of crazy pills I don’t remember being prescribed but nonetheless consume every day. The firehose of bullshit, cruelty, and incompetence. The fact that He Who Shall Not Be Named recently threatened the “end of an entire civilization” is so fucking on brand. We know he meant nukes. Just like part of me still lives in the 90s, he’s stuck in the 80s. Think about it. The boxy, ill-fitting suits. The obsession with gold-plated everything. It’s no surprise he would make the jump to nuclear threats, because that was the biggest existential spectre hanging over our heads back then. It’s so maddeningly, infuriatingly predictable. Nuclear War was an 80s thing and now he’s making it a 20s thing.
It’s exhausting. I don’t have to tell you. You’re living through it, too. It takes a concerted effort to put down the phone, turn off the feed, and remember that this is not all there is.
This is not all there is.
People are waking up and realizing this more and more, I think, and it gives me some hope. The cracks are growing. As I write this, a diverse group of people are on their way back from the Moon, further than any humans have ever ventured from Earth. They took photography classes to capture the sights they were witnessing and share them with us in the most beautiful way possible. They spoke in poetic terms about what they saw, and grappled in wonder with the perspective that can only come with looking back on our tiny, fragile planet from afar. They named a crater after the deceased wife of the command pilot and shed tears while doing so. Love. Compassion. Science.
Humanity.
Closer to home, more and more people are reexamining the value of imperfect human creativity in the face of computer-generated slop. People are rejecting Authoritarianism, standing up for one another, and doing it with weapons Fascism has no counter for: humor and joy.
Humanity.
That’s not to say it doesn’t all get me down. It does. A lot. If you struggle with that, too, my only advice is to stop for a second. Breathe. Think about your life. Think about when you were happiest. Go into your memory and pull that bundle down off the shelf. Carefully untie the twine, or ribbon, or whatever’s keeping it in a nice, organized, easy-to-manage package. Gently open it up and spend some time in it. That person you’re seeing? That’s you. That’s still you. You’re still them. Soak up their energy, their optimism. Tie the bundle back up and put it back. Leave the gun. Take the cannoli. Bring that “happy you” back to the moment at hand and use them as armor. Use them as your weapon. Use them as medicine. If enough of us do that, we might just be OK.