Nostalgia Economy

Ready or not, here they come. The young people and babies.  The old and middle-aged. The old tote their lawn chairs. The young, uninterested in sitting, crown their curls with browning daisies as they lope towards the future, or what’s left of it. The babies, ugly and needy, howl in protest. They have the right idea; the lawn chairs and wilting daisies are accouterments of pretense, props gesturing away from unstable cores. The babies haven’t yet learned to assume this pretense.  They know what they are, what we all are, red mouths hungry for love. Walking through a pop-up tent of rock n’roll history, I’m partially relieved when my conversation, my own pretense, is interrupted by a wailing baby. When adults fail to recognize our limits, we can count on babies to remind us.

There aren’t many babies at the music festival. The crowds are primarily middle-aged. Sipping weak beer from plastic cups, they mimic the young, reenact the days when they, too, loped into rock arenas. The lost days they hope still exist somewhere.  It’s why they paid  thousands of dollars to travel to the sun-bleached fairgrounds of New Orleans: they’re searching for the past. No one⏤not the bartender flicking the tap of their beer, not the custodian with plastic gloves picking up their smeared paper plates, not the musician tuning the strings of the song they danced to at their wedding⏤has the heart to tell them it’s vanished, that feeling they had before they woke startled to a mortgage, a dermatologist appointment, and a few fundamental facts they must consistently ignore in order to maintain their functioning. For example, there is the fact that their tax dollars fund the bombs falling on children in other countries. And the fact of climate change, a rising ocean. The fact of aging, of dead parents, the singular, orphaned fact that no one is responsible for them anymore. No one is coming to save the middle-aged. Perhaps this is why the inflations of their youth have vanished, why they’r never coming back. Over time, the feeling has been sublimated by a sense of responsibility. 

I don’t pity the middle-aged, but it seems a thankless period of life. Escaping this thanklessness, they flirt with the waitstaff. Sometimes they tip well. When they leave the bar, they sway out into the street, where they quietly rage against time.  A man with a Red Hot Chili Peppers tattoo puts his arm around a woman in a Nirvana tank top. One can, and does, build economies on nostalgia, and it may be I’ll wake up one day and realize I’ve bought into them.

I feel a little of the restlessness of the middle-aged. I’ll be there, soon. In ten years time⏤if I live that long, if I “keep it up”,  if I’m naggingly lucky⏤restlessness will come for me. I won’t buy festival tickets about it, but I might flee, drive with an elevated heart rate across the country. I suffer from the core belief that problems that seem unsolvable in one city can successfully be resolved in another. It is a lie I tell myself so I can go on ignoring the fundamental fact that the central problem is within me, and thus must be resolved by utilizing my inner resources, not a “change of scene.” In this way, my process of middle-aging has already begun:  I ignore this fundamental fact in order to live.

But for now, here comes the smell of hot fat. The cardboard parking signs, the road-side boss slinging $10 cocktails. The advertisements brand freedom, a sun-kissed girl in cut-off jeans loping through the desert. In reality, freedom is heavy. Freedom is a girl with bruises she doesn’t remember getting.  Freedom trips over herself as she tosses pebbles in the lake, hopes someone sees her ripples and comes to save her from herself.   The freedom of the young is just as heavy as the obligation of the middle-aged. One is either chained to one’s responsibilities or chained to an insatiable yearning. Left unchecked, this yearning can progress to self-importance, an immovable force disconnecting one from any meaningful sensual experience: the three-legged dog clicking his tercets over the cafe tile, the food one didn’t order but that exceeds expectations, an orange zest on the candied pecans, and finally, irrevocably, the love of others. 

Perhaps one reason Buddhist practice has taken off in modern American circles is that it acknowledges the problem of yearning. Of desire. Desire, they say, is the root of suffering.

Spirituality may offer some commiseration of suffering, but it cannot banish it. Nothing can. Not in this world of busy minds and fingers that, having assumed some kind of tinkering muscle-memory, tap through an ever-expanding web of information. 

Here comes the hustle, the kids in matching suits dancing as one murmuration, their mom passing a tip bucket. Where will these kids be in thirty years? Will they still be dancing? When I was a girl, I imagined a cheetah running beside my parents’ car. The cheetah ran and ran, and never tired of running. In my heart, he is still running, and will be, past my 50th birthday. A feeling might diffuse, might diminish with time, but it never dies, not really.

Here comes the trumpets with their bells of light.

Here comes a ukulele cover of Here Comes the Sun.

Here comes the sun.

Here comes everything.