A couple weeks ago, I found sweet and sour sauce at the grocery store. This is exciting only because I am in semi-rural France, which is not a place known for its abundance of non-French food.
And a few days later, hungry and in a bit of a mood, I realized that I could have a bowl of steamed white rice with sweet and sour sauce. “What? Eww”, you are thinking. “Why would you not make a proper dinner, perhaps tofu or chicken with sauce. Don’t just pour what is essentially sugar, vinegar, and ketchup on a bowl of starch? How is that a meal? What is wrong with you?”
There are a lot of things wrong with me. This one can be explained with the story of when I was a teenager working on South Street in Philadelphia at a stripper store. Not a store where we sold strippers, but where strippers came to buy their clothes.
I was paid less than was legal, and under the table, which, do we still use that term? I don’t know how localized in time or space that expression is. It means working for someone without any legal hiring agreement so the employer can not pay taxes or be held to any sort of labor standards. But any money is better than none, of course and we take what jobs we can get. Obviously I wasn’t flush with cash before or after taking the job, and I often didn’t have money for food.
There was a fantastic Chinese food place around the corner from the shop. Eventually I figured out that they would sell me a quart of plain rice and a decently-sized ramekin of sweet and sour sauce for a dollar or so. It depended on who was working that night. I would show up with loose change, sometimes taken as an “advance” from my “pay”, (with a soda brought from home) I would get enough carbs and sugar to get me through however many hours of work I had that night.
I would not say that I am nostalgic for a time I had sometimes less than a dollar to eat for the day or a place of employment that reprimanded me for calling out of work on 9/11 (because, I have no idea why?? was there going to be a run on g-strings and polyurethane boots??). So why would eating the food that kept me alive through terrible times be something I am seeking now oh wait I’ve just answered the question.
Five years before that I was spending the Christmas season recovering from my latest bout of bronchitis or pneumonia, holed up in my bedroom huffing asthma medication and playing Mario 64 and Wave Race 64, hoping my mom would come check on me so I didn’t cross paths with my dad somewhere downstairs. We were terrorized, but she was alive.
You can guess what my recent internet searches have been.
My teenage years were some of my most traumatizing, yet the nostalgia is just as though I were remembering a time and place when I was safe or unworried. There was no time in my life I have felt safe or been unworried. So maybe it’s enough for it to be a different type of worry. A smaller worry. Worry that feels contained inside your home and not spread out into the fabric of the universe inhabiting every particle in this and other dimensions like it does now. Distractions work better when your dread is not existential.
I think many of us are craving/relapsing into a time before we worried about getting a vaccine during a raging pandemic or a world-wide resurgence of fascism or a looming ecological apocalypse. Ferngully really made me feel like the adults knew what was going on with Earth and would do something about it and yes I do have Fergully on my hard drive of TV and films and have watched it in the past 12 months.
Maybe nostalgia is just being horny for delusion and distraction. Memory masturbation. Does that make nostalgia the orgasm? Ew. What is this line of thought I am sorry. I swear that is not what you do with an N64 controller and I most definitely did not order a rumble pak.
