NOSTALGIA

So I stopped to gas up today and went inside and bought a fanta in the glass bottle. My idea was that I would lean against my car, drinking fanta-in-the-glass-bottle while I gassed up. I did that, but it didn't give me the same feeling as when I drink a Mexican Coke.

Last fall I made the journey down 290 W to the Kawasaki dealership. It was the first time I'd been out there and the bastards were closed. I turned around in their parking lot and headed back to Austin with every intention of stopping at a gas station I'd spotted on the way out. The joint looked like an old wooden saloon. I had to check this out.

I parked the bike out front and wandered in, I grabbed a Mexican Coke, laid down my pennies and sauntered back out to the bike. I leaned against the bike with my ice cold Coke, casually regarding the passing traffic. Pure bliss. There are these moments when I'm not trying to do something, I'm actually being something, like my most desirable self, and this was that moment...cool fall air, crisp Coca-Cola, dark sunglasses, leather jacket, black motorcycle, and not a damn thing to do but be alive, right then, right there. It was beautiful.

I think people are chasing nostalgia. I know I've been guilty of it. It's evident in fashion, design, language, philosophy, and even religion. There is a prevailing idea that "back then" was better, or simpler, somehow more pure. I look at pics of Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe, and I, as I believe many others do, have a pinge of envy, a tickle of nostalgia. The moments looks so pure. The thing is, when they were there, in that moment, when I experience moments that evoke that feeling, it isn't by living out an imitation of a past event with period correct clothes and music ad nauseum. Only when we live completely in the moment is when we are truly alive, and the subject of the next generations nostalgia.

I find it the supremest of tragedies that although our lives are but a moment, it is humanities greatest challenge to experience it as such.