Old Roads: Where You Find Yourself.

 

When music finally tells you how you feel.

This most recent bout of maudlin nostalgia, which I have apparently been writing through for over a month now, has been an eye-opening one for me. One could almost apply the Aristotelian concepts of anagnorisis and peripeteia to it. Though, in a most anti-Aristotelian way, my reversal of fortune was for the better, not worse. We can discuss catharsis and hamartia as they pertain to me in another essay.

Old Roads: The Stories That Shape You

In my earlier essays, I briefly touched on how the stories you experience can stay with you, can become close friends, can feel like home. Whether you experience them through movies, TV shows, books, or by listening to someone speak, they become part of you, sometimes without your even knowing it.

Old Roads: Old Friends, Always Welcome

 

  What makes us go back to our enjoyments, our enthusiasms, if you will, of the past over and over again? Every time I use the word enthusiasms I am reminded of the movie The Untouchables with Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and Robert De Niro. The scene where Al Capone has his capos around a table, making a speech. "A man becomes preeminent, he is expected to have enthusiasms, enthusiasms. What are mine? What draws my admiration? What is that which gives me joy? Baseball." 

Old Roads: Returning to the Books That Made Us

In You've Got Mail Meg Ryan is writing an email (via AOL, speaking of old roads. Though to be fair, the UI looks more like an IM than an email, but it's been decades and I could be wrong.) and she writes "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?" It probably should be the other way around, but I know, for myself, that so much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, or saw in a movie.

Old Roads: Paths Though Memory.

 

Some films are favorites. Others become places we return to. For me, one of those places is the 1977 animated The Hobbit.

Music, Movies, and Memories, Oh my...

Music, who knew? Well, everyone, I suppose. Everyone but me, apparently, because this is one of those I was this many years old when I discovered it moments. 

Sometimes the Past is Past. (Or, How to Put Your Behind in the Past)

Sometimes, no matter how great the past was, it's the past and it's gone forever.

Back in the day (WAY back in the day) my high school had what would now laughably be called a computer lab. We had about 25 Atari 8-bit computers (a mix of 400 and 800 models) that we used to learn how to type, budget, write, program, and (though they didn't know it) play games. This isn't about those computers. I still have a working Atari 400 and a working Atari 800 (and countless other older computers) This is about the other thing in the lab. 

Coffee, Neurosis, and wit.

 

When I power-watch a TV series that I have already been through any number of times one of two things happens. Either I mostly ignore it, knowing exactly what is going to be said by whom and when, using it as background noise or filler. Or I pay extra attention to it wringing out new meanings, new details, and little in-jokes that I somehow missed the previous times through the show.