Episode III: The Pros and Cons of Time Travel

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR

Episode III: The Pros and Cons of Time Travel

By Erik Rader

This is probably going to turn out to be an embarrassing admission, but here goes nothing: About two years ago I started dressing like I did in high school. Last year I did some digital remixes of songs I wrote back then on my Macbook, some of which I uploaded to MySpace. And this year, I’ve downloaded a lot of the music I used to listen to back then, my own personal soundtrack I used to listen to on my Sony Cassette Walkman, now in a tenuous sort of existence as 1’s and 0’s. It seems more than coincidental that I’ve also recently begun to reconnect with old friends from that time in my life, either digitally, in person, or both. This is a common theme for people about my age, albeit amplified by our new total-access culture; what hasn’t changed is that not only do most of us find it embarrassing, pathetic, or both - it’s also usually a big mistake. William Faulkner is purported to have said, “The past isn’t dead - it isn’t even the past.” Faulkner’s own mortality aside, this becomes even more true when information about the past is so much more easily resurrected than before. I’m sure we’ll eventually be able to reconstruct Faulkner from his existing DNA and reboot all of his memories, something for which I doubt he’ll thank us.

It used to be that to do this you had to crawl up into a filthy attic, avoiding whatever sort of verminous species had taken up residence there, and dig out vinyl records, cassettes, photographs, letters, yearbooks, and old clothes from boxes. One had to sort through a physicality that both transported one to the realm of memory and yet left that memory safely dead. However, the way things are now, you have old flames from age 16 reconnecting via Facebook and ruining their current decades-old marriages; you have the school bully who used to terrorize you now asking you to “friend” him so you can buy insurance or buy into his new religion.

You might think, and I’m not sure I can convince you otherwise, that I’m acting like a certain type of middle aged person you can run across pretty much anywhere - the guys no longer within a loud shout of their twenties, who spend way too much money on sunglasses and designer sneakers, who shave their heads at the first sign of male pattern baldness, who get super-badass tattoos on their forearms; the women who seem to think they can dress like a sixteen year old going to the mall and yet still retain their dignity. But how this turns out for you really depends on how you looked in high school in the first place. If you were never that kind of person, it’s kind of a little bit late to be starting now.

I acknowledge that I am rowing on troubled waters here, but I may be a special case. In high school, I was the lead singer in a band that went from local popularity to opening for major acts in stadiums, recording a record, and even appearing in Rolling Stone magazine, all in five short years. (This was before I quit for various reasons I won’t go into here, and spent the next 20 years trying to start band no. 2.)

Over the ensuing years I ran from that past as if my ass was on fire. I still liked the same music, I just didn’t play it any more, and wouldn’t for any amount of money; and as for looking the part, I made every effort to look like someone who wasn’t trying to look like anything. Unsurprisingly, I failed in this effort, merely succeeding in looking very uncomfortable most of the time. When I think about the clothes I wore all through my 30’s, I find myself wishing I could forget. It’s time for me to admit that most of the music I wrote during that time was an equally bad fit. I certainly didn’t succeed in getting very many other people interested in it - hell, maybe I wasn’t even that interested in it.

My daughter was born about two weeks after my 40th birthday, and her arrival snapped me out of a depression as wide and deep as the decades I had spent trying to redefine myself. Seeing the world through her eyes helped me to see something I’d been suspecting for a long time - that my 15 year old self knew a few things that 40 year old me had managed to forget. One of those things was that 15 year old me wasn’t afraid of being seen. The circumstances of life eventually beat that cocksureness out of me, but at the time I reveled in the fact that people could recognize me for my swagger from city blocks away. I remember one friend cryptically informing me, “I saw you the other day, walking down the street, all like a rockstar an’ shit.” I pestered that friend for an explanation, but didn’t get one. I think I can see now what that friend saw, looking back. I’m certain that it wasn’t arrogance, although people who didn’t know me would sometimes tell me that’s what they thought it was (people who did know me knew that I had pretty much the opposite problem). It was, I believe, a simple knowledge of self. I didn’t have to “find myself” (and I wasted a great deal of time on that particular search, entirely due to forgetting this fact) because I already knew who and what I wanted to be.

Unless I’m deceiving myself, this recent climbing back into my old skin has been a low-cost and relatively inoffensive way of clearing away a quarter-century fog, a kind of coming to my senses, a dragging myself back from the brink. If I am to credit positive external feedback, there must be some benefit in my decision to forego appearing as if I had slept under a bridge. For the time since I first left my home town - which, I reckon with a wince, is more than half my life ago - that was my fashion statement: “Will work for food.” I recall meeting with an agency recruiter who sighed deeply before gesturing at my clothes (which I had thought were pretty tight) and saying “So, Erik - what do you want to be when you grow up?” I guess I had lost my swagger.

By contrast, almost every job interview I’ve gone to in the past two years has started out with the contact person reassuring me “We’re really pretty casual around here.” At my current place of employment a customer recently asked me “So, do they make you dress this nice for work or.....?” I’m not sure what the “or” option is. I found that it took too long to explain, and so instead I came up with the stock answer: “It’s just my thing.”

We tend to reject the concept of “cool” as insincere, shallow, somehow morally beneath us - we who are, to be sure, such highly substantial and spiritually developed beings. I guess I have a different definition of cool than other people. To me, it was always directly traceable to the people who created the term - urban musicians, poets and artists of the African Diaspora - and their search for dignity in the face of adversity, of self-determination in the face of cultural genocide. It’s been watered down a lot since then, and I for one certainly cannot say that I have ever been the victim of cultural genocide, unless we all have been. But I can relate to the search for dignity in the face of adversity - or as one overly-quoted wag has said, “Clean living under difficult circumstances”.

And that is what I want to recapture: Not my youth, which is as gone as gone can be, but the attitude that one’s destiny is within one’s grasp, and that dignity cannot be found in conformity, but only in an outward thrust against it. I don’t think it’s wrong to want that swagger back, that cocksureness, the intention to go against the grain whenever possible. People get old when they allow the weight of the world to put a curvature in their spine; people stay young when they use that weight as a resistance machine. If you’re looking in the mirror when you get up in the morning and noticing that curvature, maybe it’s time for a little time travel.