Nostalgia

The radio is playing songs from 1986. Phil Collins, The Outfield, whatever. In 1986, I was living in a new city where I didn't know anybody and it was really hard to make friends. I had no car, just an old ten-speed, and I worked at a Taco Bell. It pretty much sucked.

And yet, when I hear these songs, I think "Hey, I wish I was 20 again!" As if it was nothing but a big party. I guess what I really wish is that I was 20 and someone else.

Well, really it's not that I wish I was 20 again. It's just that when I'm listening to that music, I'm just remembering all the fun and good times. There were some. Not near enough for me to wish myself back there, but some.

This is called nostalgia. It's a vague sense of longing for things past. If not completely made up things, then at least things that have no bearing on reality.

I'll prove it. Ask an old person about the 1940's. The 1940's was all about World War II. Every able-bodied man was fighting. There was rationing at home. Lots of people died. Refugees. Atomic Bombs. Death Camps. An old person, though, wil tell you that ice cream cones cost a nickel and everyone was swing-dancing in the 1940's. If they mention the war at all they'll just say "that fuss over in Europe". And if you ask about Hitler they'll go, "O! That rascal!" I mean, it's completely unrealistic.

I hardly know anyone who would say that their lives are great and wonderful. I know lots of folks who think that their lives were great and wonderful when they were 19, but I knew a lot of them when they were 19, and I don't recall them thinking then that their lives were great and wonderful. I know lots of people who are 19 now and say that their lives suck and there is no such thing as love. I think they probably don't know how happy they are, and probably won't for another 15 or 20 years.

Diseases

Who decides what we call diseases? Because Anthrax is supposed to be so bad but to me it sounds like a planet in a 50's sci-fi show. Captain Adventure from Planet Anthrax! Polio sounds like a child's game, or maybe a kind of pasta.Smallpox almost sounds cute. Awwwww, look at the teeny wittle pox! And what about Lou Gehrig's disease? I hear Lou Gehrig and I think "the luckiest man on the face on the earth," not a progressive degenerative nerve disorder.

Diseases should have long names like Multiple Sclerosis or Cystic Fibrosis. Anything that ends in "osis" or "itis" sounds bad. Cancer sounds bad. In the Middle Ages they had the plague and the Black Death. Maybe those were the same thing, I'm not sure, but if they are it doesn't seem fair that they used up two great names for one disease.

Think about someone like Arthur P. Murrah. I don't know who he is, but at some point he did something significant enough to have a federal building named after him. He didn't know anything about Timothy McVeigh or his anti-government politics.

I guess that's the risk you take, though, when stuff is named after you. Like the Bob Hope Classic, a golf tournament. That's pretty safe, I think. Hardly anyone ever dies playing golf. But I wouldn't want an Indy Car Race named after me, or a dirigible, or an ocean liner, or really just about anything that could blow up or sink or be remembered for lots of people dying.