The nostalgia trap

Minnesota has the hippest state fair in the whole wide world. Sonic Youth is opening for The Flaming Lips on the first night.

There are some pretty good regional acts playing the fair in Baton Rouge this year, including my favorite zydeco sweetie, Geno Delafose. But if there are any national acts, they're third tier Nashville one-hit wonders or has-beens.

The other main difference is that the Minnesota fair takes place at the end of August through the beginning of September. Down here, the fair is late October into November, when the heat finally starts to fade a bit.

Mr. M wants to go see Sonic Youth because they remind him of his (um) youth. They remind me of that strange lost period of limbo when I left my husband. For a few months I worked as the night auditor at the hotel they were staying at when they first got to town to record Washing Machine in Memphis. Kim Deal was with them. I remember both Kim Gordon and Kim Deal seemed impossibly cool and also older than I expected. I know Kim Gordon is about 15 years older than me, so she would have been in her early 40s at that point. But that made her even cooler. Like someone who managed to retain her authentic rock chick coolness into her forties got a thousand extra coolness points.

I've been doing too much looking back and mooning over the old days. But back then I was always waiting for my life to start, waiting to bloom. I've been a late bloomer. But something in me seems programmed for nostalgia and regret. And here I am in the most past-obsessed city in the United States. Now the past seems like all we've got.

I think that, looks-wise, I peaked at around age 34. Now I've advanced all the way to almost 38, and I'm pining to be 34 again. It's dumb. My past wasn't all that great. I wasn't really ever happy until I got to New Orleans when I was 30. After that, my life started to get better, but it was still pretty fucked up for awhile. I was finally getting out of a long term rut when Katrina hit. I almost kind of needed that hurricane, as horrible as it has been. It created a definite before and after.

I think the second half of my life can and should be better than the first half, if I could just get myself to pay attention and stop looking back so much.

Instead, though, I've spent the last few days nursing a sudden obsession with Crispin Glover circa the mid-80s. I watched Back to the Future, which was tedious and obvious and heavy-handed in that Hollywood blockbuster way. Glover was the only thing that saved it, and he did look an awful lot like Mr. M in it. The "I am your density" momemt was really sweet. But he was more interesting in River's Edge. I've posted a video clip below in which I think he's really funny. He's a jittery teenage speed freak, but his mannerisms and inflections, especially in the first 30 seconds, remind me very much of Mr. M when he's in a certain teasing mood.

But however interesting an actor Crispin Glover may be, he can never be or give me what I really want from him, which is Mr. M when he was young and healthy, before things went wrong.

Before the hurricane, Mr. M and I hadn't had any contact for about three months or so, and longer than that since we had talked on the phone. Things had been tense between us. He got back in touch because he was worried about me after the hurricane. When he did, he had two things to tell me about. Karl Mueller, the bass player from Soul Asylum, had died of cancer a couple of months before at the age of 41. It's not like they were close friends, but Mr. M knew him and liked him from back in the day and he went to the funeral. I think it was a disconcerting thing for him. He might well have been the one from that scene who died way too early but not quite young.

Instead, Mr. M had just (finally!) found a donor who was a good match. All of a sudden it seemed like he had a future again. Without that spark of hope, I don't think he would have allowed us to get into this again.

At that time, he thought he would have the transplant in January. That's what has made this wait so hard. I have the paranoid fear that the donor is going to back out. I'm so incredibly grateful to him and yet so frustrated with him for postponing, no matter how good his reason. And if I feel this way, just think how Mr. M must feel.

He's lost some things he'll never get back. Nevertheless he finally has cause to hope that he has a future and that it will be much better than the last decade. There is reason to hope that we will have a future as a couple. There's lots of ways things could go wrong, lots of ways I could be wrong about us, but I think maybe we could be pretty happy.

In any case, unless I catch a stray bullet, I have a future and a present of my own to attend to.

Physically, aging scares me, but I could be healthy and attractive for a long time yet. But not if I don't start paying attention. I've been lucky to be relatively free of the weird body hatred-obsession that a lot of women seem to have. I've mostly stayed on the high range of a healthy weight. I wear a size 10, which is enormous by fashion standards, and maybe by some guys' standards, but for the most part guys have been happy with my figure and so have I. I get a decent amount of exercise without trying too hard. I walk the dog and bike to school and get in and out of periods of going to the gym and taking yoga classes.

But I can tell things are going to stop being so easy. I gained weight during the diaspora, and it didn't come off easily. It's not that I need to radically change everything. I just need to pay attention, make a few conscious changes. I don't want to deprive myself of anything I like, but I should start eating vegetables and cut back a little on the sugar and maybe the pepperoni pizza and the fried chicken. I just ate a whole box of Blue Bell fudge pops in in 24 hours. It's not a matter of dieting, just pacing myself better.

I've always taken good care of my skin, which is paying off, but my hair is another story. I need a real haircut. I need to start paying attention to what I wear. I need to pay attention.

It's not just my physical self. I need to pay attention to my mental and emotional habits, stop doing the things I do to sabotage myself. I started going to therapy, not with the therapist I mentioned before, but at a reduced fee clinic with a student therapist. So she's not that experienced, but I like her. Anyway I just mostly need someone outside my life to help me notice and pay attention to what goes on in my head.

The bottom line is that I need to pay attention to myself and my life right now, and I can't do that if I'm spending my energy pining to relive and re-do the entire period from about 1985 to 2000.

Like the hippies said: Be Here Now.

(This turned into an awfully long post. Never fear, my loyal and exhausted readers. In a week school will start again and I won't have time to write.)