Chasing a specific nostalgia

Loose like the wind.

Photo by Manuel Sardo on Unsplash

Not so long ago on an otherwise nondescript weekday afternoon, I approached the pick-up line for my son’s preschool and suddenly had the urge to listen to a certain song.

This is my first year of this method to dropping off or retrieving kids from preschool, and initially I found it annoying. All my previous experiences with our three kids were a little haphazard but generally faster: find a parking spot wherever I could, retrieve one or more children using some sort of proof that I was authorized to do so, and then get in the car to leave.

As time has gone on this year, however, I have come to understand the bargain. In exchange for a line that generally takes about 10-15 minutes to get through, I don’t have to get out of a temperature-controlled vehicle. I don’t have to witness nor participate in the chaos of 5-year-olds getting packed up and putting on all their winter gear. When I pull to the front of the line, my son is escorted to the vehicle. The door opens and he’s in. We pull over for maybe 30 seconds in a nearby designated zone to make sure he is buckled. And away we go.

Perhaps just as critically, those 10-15 minutes in the line are mine. Regularly lurching forward a few dozen feet creates some welcome boundaries. The logistics make it hard to check e-mails or do work.

It is instead an invitation to let my mind wander a little.

And on this day, the daydream had a soundtrack: “Rattled by the Rush,” a song by the band Pavement that I probably hadn’t listened to in decades.

I queued it up and sang along, remembering the lyrics verbatim, followed by another suggested Pavement song (“Stereo”, which I had listened to more recently, as the algorithm surely new).

The front of the line was getting closer, and having done countless pickups this year I know that my son prefers silence (and will paradoxically shout this preference) on the ride home after a day of stimulation.

The sequence felt important enough for me to hastily write down a note in my phone, the official place for essay ideas, links I don’t want to lose and grocery lists.

I was sure I had written down something more profound, but when I went to retrieve it and think more about the experience, all it said was: “Chasing a specific nostalgia. Pavement.”

What did I mean by that?

Was it a yearning for a particular era of music?

Could Pavement, a band whose active prominence basically spanned the entirety of the 1990s, even rise to a noteworthy level if they were formed right now?

Their sound is loose and spare, jangly, in no hurry at all, making vague but important points with lyrics that seem like a series of inside jokes.

Their ethos, and that of a lot of the bands I listened to in that era, was that of falling awkwardly and somewhat apologetically into fame instead of straining lustily toward it.

(If you don’t believe me, the entire video for 1995’s “Rattled by the Rush” is a bunch of jump cuts of the band playing inside one square of a tile while a dirty bathtub fills with water. Why? Because it was the 1990s. We had endless time to think of ways to be cool by intentionally not being cool. I won’t be impressed by or worried about A.I. until it makes a music video like that without any prompts).

The compact disc (“Wowee Zowee” is its title, of course) that contains the song is still in a sleeve inside one of two giant albums in the basement, but those physical circles are mostly artifacts.

As demonstrated in the car that day, I can still listen to “Rattled by the Rush” whenever I want, wherever I am, as long as I’m willing to first watch five seconds of an ad telling how to make money with one weird trick.

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Music is part of the nostalgia I was seeking, I decide, but it’s in the background. What I was really getting at as I sat there that day, as it comes back to me, is this:

A yearning to go back and live one day in 1999 or thereabouts.

NOT for any vain attempt to recapture my youth. I don’t need to feel what it is like to be in my early 20s again, and I dare say I’m better at being 48 than I was at being 22.

NOT for a specific memory. I still have those. Some are a little dusty or fuzzy, amalgamations squished into one thing but mine all the same.

NOT to warn people of specific tragedies or undesired paths ahead. That would be tempting, sure, but I’ve watched enough time travel cinema to know that you don’t mess with the space-time continuum unless you want to risk the collapse of the entire universe (which I don’t).

The specific nostalgia I’m chasing is elusive, but it comes down to this: I want to live a day in 1999 because I just don’t remember what it felt like to be alive in 1999.

We are too far removed from it. It is too different from now, having accelerated a quarter-century since, for me to recall the feeling of the time.

What did it feel like before we all had supercomputers in our pockets and life on demand? What did it feel like to wait for things, even just a little? Did we breathe differently when there weren’t 17 news cycles every day, all of which had the intensity of a fire hose?

What was it like when you were running late to meet someone and had no way of letting them know? What did a physical map or 17 pages of MapQuest directions feel like?

How did we do anything?

I want to live one day of it, just to compare it to now. I don’t know if it would be better or worse. Would I decide it was boring, having experienced life now?

I don’t know.

The comparative problem is mostly one of time. We live slowly, a day at a time, but science fiction is not written about what life on Earth will be like one month from now. A historical fiction novel about life in December 2024 would not work. We must vault ahead or look back decades or even centuries to really feel the difference or the anticipated change, but that’s impossible in reality.

The distant past is never the same as we remember it, removed of its rough patches and left with just snapshots.

The distant future has never been as wild as we pre-imagined it — both for better and for worse — which I hope will still be true down the road. (This David Roth piece about the most recent iteration of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was excellent even as it left me uneasy).

I can’t simulate 1999 in 2025. Try to go analog or off the grid and you’ll see how fast you come back. Everything is just too embedded in our lives.

We have to work hard now just to remember to be intentional, a theme Melissa Kirsch explored quickly but deftly in Saturday’s edition of The Morning newsletter.

In arguing for New Month traditions instead of New Year traditions — hey, I wrote an entire short story that was sort of about that, so count me in! — Kirsch concludes thusly:

But if you are anything like me, underneath the rational voice that just wants to accomplish, you’re craving a little more ritual, something brief and self-contained that for a moment derails the inexhaustible locomotive of living and reminds us we’re still here, people with desires and ambitions and complicated hopes and tender needs that we’re always forgetting to check in on.

If I chased my specific nostalgia to any sort of end, is this the world I would find in 1999: one where we don’t have to create intention around how we want to live because 1) there is more time and space to just be that way and 2) the notions of living well haven’t been quantified and gamified to the point where they become another box to check instead of an enriching process?

Do I just arrive at this possible answer because whatever strands of a day in the life of 1999 I can remember were at a far different point in my life, one that naturally had fewer stressors and more space? Would I appreciate the time and space we did enjoy back then even if they weren’t accompanied by the trappings of a more comfortable (if congested) life I live in the present?

Another way of looking at it: Would someone who was 48 in 1999 feel like that was a dizzying pace and strain to feel what it was like in 1974?

I’ll never know for sure, so I have to settle on choosing my own adventure the best I can in the here and now.

That means moving fast when the rush of our time is exhilarating and slowing down when I feel rattled by it.

• TFD’S SUBSCRIBER SPOTLIGHT: As promised at the start of 2025, I am starting a few new features here aimed at diversifying the type of content offered, building a greater sense of community and saying thanks to subscribers. A new benefit offered to paid subscribers is the opportunity to promote their own creative endeavors every month in this space to the larger audience of all readers.

  Up first is Jimmy Lonetti, who runs an awesome shop in my old neighborhood in Minneapolis. He writes in describing it:

  My D&J Glove Repair biz has proved to be a very satisfying side business that has turned into a great retirement gig for me. Restoring customers’ baseball gloves (and memories) is really a pretty great niche I've carved out. And being part of the South Minneapolis neighborhood/business community is ideal.

  Here is the link to my website.

Agreed! If you are a paid subscriber and would like to get a shout out next month, you will get specific instructions on that process in a separate email a couple weeks from now.

• Speaking of new content, you also quite possibly noticed the first The Friscalating Dusklight podcast episode went up a few days ago featuring WCCO Radio’s Jason DeRusha. We had a great conversation that was both serious and funny, touching on topics ranging from aging (Jason turned 50 a week ago) to the stages of parenthood to the challenges of running a restaurant in our post-COVID world. I don’t have an exact publishing schedule for future podcast episodes, but I imagine there will be one or two a month. It’s a little more of a freewheeling way to inject other voices into a lot of the themes I write about and care about deeply. Do you know a guest I should try to interview? Let me know about it! You can find the first episode (along with a transcript tab in case you prefer reading instead of listening) here; all episodes will also be on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.