memory

I miss that Real Grownups (like Johnny Carson!) took seriously a gentle man in a turtleneck who spoke about “star stuff.”

I miss that science was once considered a means by which to glimpse the divine.

I miss a man who dared to write four pages for Parade Magazine about abortion, and somehow got most people to agree with him.

I miss the guy who wrote a screenplay and a novel about traveling to outer space to converse with aliens, that didn’t insult the audience’s intelligence.

I miss his awesome Cosmos spaceship which he piloted with a look of spacey awe.

I miss that his work had as much History as Future in it; that we could never know where we were going without understanding how we arrived at where we were.

Carl Sagan was my hero as a kid. I read Cosmic Connection very very slowly when I was ten, it was the first “hard book” I had ever read. He was a pretty good scientist and a phenomenal communicator. He never talked down to us, he assumed our best natures, he made difficult concepts comprehensible. I admit I’m a huge nerd, but he made science seem cool.

So right now I’m listening to the excessive 4-disc reissue of Nevermind

Nevermind is very much Of My Generation — I was just barely 20 when it came out — so I’ve kind of been avoiding the whole “20 years ago today” we’re having about this. (This and R.E.M.’s breakup, and now kids born in 1990 are drinking in bars, legally. Also 20 years ago: Linklater’s Slacker and Coupland’s Generation X and the World Wide Web. YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN.)

I don’t remember thinking Nevermind was very exciting or original at the time, but then I was already a Pixies fan.

I’ve kind of formed an amalgam memory about September 1991. I was moving (back) into the dorms as an RA and during move-in week (late August) the speakers pointed into the quad were playing three songs depending on where a particular freshman had just moved to Lincoln, Nebraska from:

• From Omaha (rough side of town): “Down Wit’ OPP"
• From Omaha (nice side of town): “Don’t Cry” GnR)
• From small towns: “I Got Friends in Low Places"

But by October the only noise you heard in the quad was “Load up on guns and bring your friends..."

I think the official line for music types is that Nevermind was kind of a sellout album, what with the Big Vig production and all. But it was the production that made THIS album the one that broke punk forever. I remember playing Hüsker Dü for a metalhead girl in high school and her criticism was something like “it doesn’t even sound like it was recorded properly.” (OK, “Grunge") was one well-produced album away from being a big thing.

Oh well, whatever.

The last three weeks have provided a lot of drama for my inner life. In no order:

1. At work we are launching yet. Another. Redesign. There was ethnographic user testing. I’m not the sole front end coder any more. Can’t escape the feeling that web design as I’ve done it for a decade is fast becoming the next Desktop Publishing — and what am I doing to future-proof myself? Nada.
2. Jenny and I are selling our house. Three feelings predominate: 1. regret at the financial decisions that got us here, 2. shame at my failure as sole provider/financial strategist for the family unit, 3. resentment at Jenny (hell, women in the abstract) for having choices (“I want to stay home with the kids”) where (sexist that I am) I feel I don’t get.
   
   Minor themes: gonna miss this house; gonna miss the neighborhood more; I did a lot of minor maintenance that I put off for way too long; why did we spend so much time making it so nice when we clearly didn’t want it; I really do want to live with no possessions in a studio apartment yes all four of us and the dog; why did I ever think this was a good idea? I’m a born renter.
3. We spent a week in Nebraska. My first visit in seven years. Seven years is long enough that it is no longer familiar on a logical level (“wait, did this street always run one-way? And who put all these strip malls out here in the farmland?”) A profound sense of dislocation: I kept saying and thinking “back home in Oregon,” but my lizard brain still misses humidity, the drone of locusts, the smell of pin oaks, and my high school and college buddies. Lincoln would be a great place to raise a family (For sixteen years I’ve said of Nebraska: “it’s a great place to be from.”) Such nice swimming pools, museums, schools. Hell, nice Interstate rest stops. Perhaps they care so much about their built environment because God gave them so little of the natural one.
   
   My roots have left Nebraska. Of my extended family (to the second generation) I have one cousin left there. Twenty years ago most of us were Nebraskans, not ex-Nebraskans. Weird and welcoming to share this place with Orion, who fairly worships tractors.
   
   And then: my uncle Jimmy, whose memorial drew us there. I missed his presence but it was unescapable. I last saw him eight years ago, I never knew the person he became as his body failed him.

I set aside an afternoon this past weekend to try to wrangle these thoughts, write them down, own them (purge them?) It was epically depressing. I just sat at my computer and felt useless and old. When I approached thirty years of age I had a Crisis of Self and it was Not Happy. And the stakes then were really low: no house, no debt, no kids, a wife with a different surname, a new career to which I was largely indifferent. It was stupid then but with the power of Youth it made me better. I’m gonna spare myself a repeat as I near forty (less than two months away). But really: useless and old. Race half run. Not yet a millionaire.

And when did I start wishing I were a millionaire?