Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
Link to original post: [drupal=4097]Stickerbrush Symphony: When Nostalgia Stings [/drupal]
Stickerbrush Symphony
I decided to go for a walk last night. It was about fifteen minutes until midnight and I felt that I had to get out of the house. I was bored, depressed, and, above all else, I felt smothered by the lonely atmosphere that seemed to envelope the entire house. I often feel like this when I come home for Spring Break and the summer but this time, it was further exaggerated by the fact that my car was in the shop all week and still is as I write this. In a strange sense it's become somewhat of a tradition: a tradition of being and feeling alone when I'm at home.
I prepared for the walk in a ho-hum fashion. I put on my hat now covered in cat hair from spending so much time in the basement this week. I put on my trench coat that, admitably, was too heavy for the cool weather. I put on my ratty tennis shoes that still have sand in them from trudging the Mississippi River months ago. I didn't bother putting on socks or a shirt because I simply wanted to get out of the house as fast as possible. If you've ever read the short story “the Yellow Wallpaper,” my feelings were similar; I felt unnervingly stir crazy. I was practically poisoning myself with nostalgia just to give myself something to think about. The bottom line was that I needed to get out and I started my walk through the neighborhood I had known for twenty years.
I walked through my neighborhood in the moonlight, all the sights being familiar and unfamilar at the same time. I would rattle off the names of old friend's houses as I passed them. Some I knew still lived in them (or at least their parents did), others had moved years ago, and some I didn't even know because I had been out of touch for so long. Walking around in what could have passed as an extremelly lazy Halloween costume, I felt like an outsider, a lone trick-or-treater who was much too old for the activity and was painfully aware that October ended months ago. Despite this, he still goes through the motions to try to spark something, anything, to keep from acknowledging how out of place he is.
The walk continued on for about an hour as I went up and down hills that, back when I was another person, I had given roller-coaster like names to and rode down recklessly on my bike. This was back when I actually knew a good number of my neighbors; a time that had long since passed. My hometown becomes more and more foreign with each passing year and it makes me wonder if my old friends who still have roots here feel the same way when they come back. I came back home at around one in the morning with a blister the size of a strawberry on my right foot and the resolve to write this essay.
Coming home now-a-days for me is like playing a video game on an old console: you usually don't do it for fun, you do it to briefly relive old memories. You'll play a few stages, a boss, or try to zip through the whole thing in a few hours if possible. There isn't anything new to do and there hasn't been for years. This similie is most appropriate for my situation because in my basement I have six old consoles with probably close to 200 different games. As I said in an earlier essay, nostalgia can be just as hurtful as it can be comforting. You can relive the memories but without the warm emtions the expereinces originally produced. Out of all the games I own, there is one game that probably highlights this better than all the others and that game is Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest for the Super Nintendo.
One of my fondest video game memories is receiving this game Christmas Day 1995 and playing it most of the day with my sister and cousins. Sitting here, I can even remember how the air around me felt (warm with a twinge of cold from the small window above the TV) and smelled (like a lit fireplace) as I played the game where monkeys battle pirate crocodiles. In my memory, I can watch that time as clearly as looking through a window. It is a time that has long passed nearly 16 years ago and I know I won't experience it again. I believe there is a music track in the game that personifies nostalgia as I have described it: something that can be hauntingly beautiful as well as eerily loneseome. That track is called Stickerbrush Symphony.
This bit of music plays in four stages in the game and they all share the same characteristics: they are over-grown bramble patches that tower into the sky. Brambles are essentially thorn covered vines that are highly parasitic to any other plant that dares to grow near them.They occur naturally in the wild but they are especially notorious for coming from abandoned flower gardens with extra emphasis on the word “abandoned.” Even though brambles are weeds, they grow slowly and for them to completely overrun a garden it takes years of negligence. Now imagine a bramble patch that towers so high into the sky that even sunlight has a hard time getting through it. When I come home now-a-days, I often feel like that's what I'm coming back to: a garden that has long been abandoned.
The garden has been naturally abandoned. Many of my friends and I went off to college. Some of them went into the military, some went directly into the work force, and some even got married. It happens; that's life and is a major part of everyone growing up. There's no use crying over spilled milk but I feel as though I'm stuck looking at a stain as if milk no longer existed. My old friends still exist; it's just that they're leading different lives now. It's gotten to the point that I almost feel like I'm intruding on their lives if I try to go deeper than the casual Facebook relationship and I wouldn't be surprized if they felt the same way. You could say that I'm having abandonment issues but nobody abandoned me on purpose and, like them, I left my hometown with a purpose of my own. It's complicated but simple enough that my feelings could probably be noted as being universal.
I know this won't be the last time I feel this way. In two years time, I will be leaving the college I currently go to with a Master's degree in hand and have to leave behind the dozens of friends I made in the 5 years I was there. My apartment will probably go to some junior who was just as uncertain about his future as I was, my spots in the clubs will go to people with similar enthusiasm, and my job will go to the next suitable applicant. I feel that there will always be a place for me in both Saint Charles and Cape Girardeau but it will become increasingly smaller as the years pass. Maybe I need to come to the realization that, throughout my life, I will have to replant gardens over and over again and abandon most of them just as often. I may reutrn to these gardens to find that there is nothing much left for me but I should take some solace in the fact that there is anything at all and that I haven't been entirely run out by brambles. Even mile high brambles can be beautiful if you can briefly admire the roses that have managed to survive and then be on your way, happy that you were able to successfully grow them all those years ago.
Fatmanonice, March 18th, 2011
“Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; but only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay”.-Robert Frost
"Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.”- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.”- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Stickerbrush Symphony
I decided to go for a walk last night. It was about fifteen minutes until midnight and I felt that I had to get out of the house. I was bored, depressed, and, above all else, I felt smothered by the lonely atmosphere that seemed to envelope the entire house. I often feel like this when I come home for Spring Break and the summer but this time, it was further exaggerated by the fact that my car was in the shop all week and still is as I write this. In a strange sense it's become somewhat of a tradition: a tradition of being and feeling alone when I'm at home.
I prepared for the walk in a ho-hum fashion. I put on my hat now covered in cat hair from spending so much time in the basement this week. I put on my trench coat that, admitably, was too heavy for the cool weather. I put on my ratty tennis shoes that still have sand in them from trudging the Mississippi River months ago. I didn't bother putting on socks or a shirt because I simply wanted to get out of the house as fast as possible. If you've ever read the short story “the Yellow Wallpaper,” my feelings were similar; I felt unnervingly stir crazy. I was practically poisoning myself with nostalgia just to give myself something to think about. The bottom line was that I needed to get out and I started my walk through the neighborhood I had known for twenty years.
I walked through my neighborhood in the moonlight, all the sights being familiar and unfamilar at the same time. I would rattle off the names of old friend's houses as I passed them. Some I knew still lived in them (or at least their parents did), others had moved years ago, and some I didn't even know because I had been out of touch for so long. Walking around in what could have passed as an extremelly lazy Halloween costume, I felt like an outsider, a lone trick-or-treater who was much too old for the activity and was painfully aware that October ended months ago. Despite this, he still goes through the motions to try to spark something, anything, to keep from acknowledging how out of place he is.
The walk continued on for about an hour as I went up and down hills that, back when I was another person, I had given roller-coaster like names to and rode down recklessly on my bike. This was back when I actually knew a good number of my neighbors; a time that had long since passed. My hometown becomes more and more foreign with each passing year and it makes me wonder if my old friends who still have roots here feel the same way when they come back. I came back home at around one in the morning with a blister the size of a strawberry on my right foot and the resolve to write this essay.
Coming home now-a-days for me is like playing a video game on an old console: you usually don't do it for fun, you do it to briefly relive old memories. You'll play a few stages, a boss, or try to zip through the whole thing in a few hours if possible. There isn't anything new to do and there hasn't been for years. This similie is most appropriate for my situation because in my basement I have six old consoles with probably close to 200 different games. As I said in an earlier essay, nostalgia can be just as hurtful as it can be comforting. You can relive the memories but without the warm emtions the expereinces originally produced. Out of all the games I own, there is one game that probably highlights this better than all the others and that game is Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest for the Super Nintendo.
One of my fondest video game memories is receiving this game Christmas Day 1995 and playing it most of the day with my sister and cousins. Sitting here, I can even remember how the air around me felt (warm with a twinge of cold from the small window above the TV) and smelled (like a lit fireplace) as I played the game where monkeys battle pirate crocodiles. In my memory, I can watch that time as clearly as looking through a window. It is a time that has long passed nearly 16 years ago and I know I won't experience it again. I believe there is a music track in the game that personifies nostalgia as I have described it: something that can be hauntingly beautiful as well as eerily loneseome. That track is called Stickerbrush Symphony.
This bit of music plays in four stages in the game and they all share the same characteristics: they are over-grown bramble patches that tower into the sky. Brambles are essentially thorn covered vines that are highly parasitic to any other plant that dares to grow near them.They occur naturally in the wild but they are especially notorious for coming from abandoned flower gardens with extra emphasis on the word “abandoned.” Even though brambles are weeds, they grow slowly and for them to completely overrun a garden it takes years of negligence. Now imagine a bramble patch that towers so high into the sky that even sunlight has a hard time getting through it. When I come home now-a-days, I often feel like that's what I'm coming back to: a garden that has long been abandoned.
The garden has been naturally abandoned. Many of my friends and I went off to college. Some of them went into the military, some went directly into the work force, and some even got married. It happens; that's life and is a major part of everyone growing up. There's no use crying over spilled milk but I feel as though I'm stuck looking at a stain as if milk no longer existed. My old friends still exist; it's just that they're leading different lives now. It's gotten to the point that I almost feel like I'm intruding on their lives if I try to go deeper than the casual Facebook relationship and I wouldn't be surprized if they felt the same way. You could say that I'm having abandonment issues but nobody abandoned me on purpose and, like them, I left my hometown with a purpose of my own. It's complicated but simple enough that my feelings could probably be noted as being universal.
I know this won't be the last time I feel this way. In two years time, I will be leaving the college I currently go to with a Master's degree in hand and have to leave behind the dozens of friends I made in the 5 years I was there. My apartment will probably go to some junior who was just as uncertain about his future as I was, my spots in the clubs will go to people with similar enthusiasm, and my job will go to the next suitable applicant. I feel that there will always be a place for me in both Saint Charles and Cape Girardeau but it will become increasingly smaller as the years pass. Maybe I need to come to the realization that, throughout my life, I will have to replant gardens over and over again and abandon most of them just as often. I may reutrn to these gardens to find that there is nothing much left for me but I should take some solace in the fact that there is anything at all and that I haven't been entirely run out by brambles. Even mile high brambles can be beautiful if you can briefly admire the roses that have managed to survive and then be on your way, happy that you were able to successfully grow them all those years ago.
Fatmanonice, March 18th, 2011
“Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; but only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay”.-Robert Frost
"Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.”- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.”- Percy Bysshe Shelley
