I’ve spent more time in my hometown over the past two years than in the previous thirty, but it wasn’t until this most recent trip that I had occasion to really reflect on it, and on the version of me that grew up there. Maybe it was because the jetlag was worse than usual — spinny-brain insomnia — or maybe, unlike last year’s series of visits, I wasn’t as preoccupied with my Dad’s steadily declining health. At any rate, there was more time to think.
Some of that time involved sorting through childhood paraphernalia, physical artifacts tethering me to an almost-forgotten past. And some involved watching the Buffalo Sabres’ electrifying second-round playoff series against Montreal, which — more so than the casual, distracted hockey habits I’ve cultivated since the 1990s — recreated the anxious emotional space of those days, when hope felt normal, disappointment crushing. These activities felt a little like time travel: jolts of fond nostalgia, surges of embarrassment, then waves of relief to realize I’m in a much better place nowadays. A trip home, in more ways than one.
I shouldn’t underestimate the impact of all that spelunking through the junk of yesteryear. One of the upstairs closets in the house was still full of high-school and college detritus that needed to be reviewed, sorted, saved, or pitched. This exercise was mildly but unexpectedly fraught. What do you do with your old Little League baseball trophies, for example? Hang onto them to commemorate the modest triumphs of a small-town athlete? Or throw them away, a symbolic act given the bookish, sedentary shape of my life since then? Objects both priceless and meaningless.
Then there were the high school yearbooks. I spent an hour or so looking at photos and reading through the scribbles of my classmates from the late 1980s, a process both cringeworthy and hilarious. Sifted from the expected barrage of “stay cools” and “have a great summers” was an interesting snapshot of my unconventional social scene. The bizarre cross-section of Fredonians I grew up with were funnier, quirkier, and more politically diverse than I remembered. Some of those girls might have been hitting on me, while others were taking the piss by pretending to, but then (as now) I couldn’t tell the difference. Awkward reminders of past, long-gone relationships. Friends writing “in-joke code” so cryptically I can’t even remember what they were talking about. And my favorite, a “roses are red” poem from an acquaintance that ended “you’re a real jerk, so fuck you.” How do you throw away such ephemera? Why the hell would you keep it?
Eventually, I put my finger on why I was feeling wistful about all this. Life felt bigger, then. I’m sure that’s not a particularly uncommon middle-aged thought: that in the wisdom-dearth of youth, life seems huge. At that age, with the future unwritten, everything feels unlimited — not because it actually is, but because you haven’t yet started probed its limits. Hence the powerful draw many people have for nostalgia, I suppose; it situates you in a frame of mind more receptive to life’s possibilities. I’ve always said I wouldn’t turn back the clock if you paid me, but surrounded by all those reminders, I get how people might mistake them for their best years. Before you figure your shit out, figuring your shit out seems possible. Learning feels like gaining. But as you get older, learning is also a kind of losing. Gaps fill, limits reveal themselves — robbing us of the capacity for wonder, possibility, surprise, discovery, hope.
Of course, this got me thinking (in a very Gen X way) about all that we have lost — and, more precisely, what’s been taken from us. The internet gave us connection, then took it away, transforming it into the attention economy, political manipulation, and surveillance capitalism. The economy gave us choices, then consolidated them away, reducing our power, limiting our options, concentrating the profits in the hands of the (very, very) few. American politics sold us a vision that wasn’t real, then denuded that vision so thoroughly that it became all too real. And Big Tech took the wide-eyed, imaginative dreams of science fiction and parlayed them into a hellscape of control, surveillance, digital rent, and flattened creativity. The world gave us dreams, then increasingly made them unachievable. (And I can’t even imagine what subsequent generations must be going through.)
Is this just midlife-crisis whinging, or a reflection on the specific cyclical pendulum-swing I’ve lived through? Both, perhaps. Who knows? What I do know is that sitting there, situating myself in the brain of Younger Me, it strangely felt like I was living in a smaller world than he was. Oh, even back then I’m sure I sort of understood everything is finite: the resources we use, the environment we take for granted, the number of years we get to spend on this heartbreaking miracle of a planet. But I didn’t expect them to be this finite.
This is why I find our era so enraging, and so depressing. Because sure, even as everything is finite, most of us remember a time when it felt like that finiteness could be more than enough. There would always be more to learn, more to do, more to see, more to invent, more to discover. There was always another rock to turn over, another horizon to see beyond, an improved future state to build. And yet, for some reason we built a system that enshrined competing for everything the world had to offer. Ripping it out of each other’s hands, narrowing options, tilting the playing field. Everything reduced to a single, cruel paradigm. I’m sure to an extent this is just my growing jaded with age. But I also genuinely think there’s an entire, toxic class of actors in the world who have profited so monumentally from boiling everything down to numbers that we may never get that sense of wonder and opportunity back. It’s a damn shame.
And so, back to Portland, to the life and family I’ve built, and love, and feel grateful for every day. I’m so appreciative of all that I have and how far I’ve come. Yet it also feels a bit smaller? Which makes sense. It’s smaller because I know more than I did when it felt bigger. There are fewer years left to me, there’s less time to explore and create and experience things. Not to mention legions of bastards out there, committed to making everything worse, and a system that ruthlessly extracts our time and attention.
But it also feels smaller in a good way. I have a better sense of what matters now. Maybe more focus, and a clearer sense of what I should be doing and how I should spend my time, and who I should spend it with. There isn’t much I would change about who I am or how I got here. Not even the mistakes, which in a lot of ways are at the core of me.
Still, there’s something to be said for that teenaged cluebag’s open-ended worldview. It would be nice to feel like anything is possible, again. Which probably explains my passion for story. For me, story may be the only infinite thing left — which is why it has always been my sanctuary, why I spend so much time reflecting on it here. Of course, story too is under siege. Generative AI has come along to threaten even that haven of endless possibility; as with everything else, the system we’ve built aims to control, commodify, and automate it. Anyone who knows me at all knows how thoroughly I abhor AI, and this is precisely why: It feels like the end stage of a coordinated global plot to make the world more generic, less diverse. Less human. And smaller.
Is there even an upshot to this post, a coherent thesis statement? Probably not. Perhaps, subconsciously, I don’t want to boil this one down to a point. Let it just pose its questions and provoke its thoughts, and suggest whatever it may suggest.
But, if you put a gun to my head, I suppose I would just say this trip home put me in an interesting headspace. A cloud of confusion concealing a moment of clarity, some nebulous insight about aging and change. It’s good to go back home, to remember where you came from; it’s also good to leave again. I may have grown up in Fredonia, but I’m not that guy anymore. And in this moment, maybe I better understand him, why he was the way he was. Honestly, I miss that idiot, but I’d also like to think that, despite all his flaws, he’d be pleased to know how he ended up.
