Nostalgia: the one about snow

In psychology there’s this well accepted distinction between the logical brain and the emotional brain. The logical brain works like a computer (for lack of a better analogy; maybe quantum computer?), the emotional one works on the harder to define stuff. 

The emotional brain runs on your basic emotions like laughter and being thrilled, but also on the more complex ones that nurture in a whole other way. It’s one of those more complex emotions that we deal with here. 

Nostalgia really is an interesting emotion, because it’s a visceral trip down memory lane. It’s something that we can share in with others who are more or less our age. It links up to a whole array of other things like music, movies, food, drinks, friends, what we did to have fun, etc etc, but at the same time ------- how you really feel about something is hard to define. The closest might be this constant k (kierkegaard): ‘all that remains is a mood, a single color’. 

To some degree that’s how it works with memory: ask me about a movie in three years and I may not be able to tell you much about the story-line, but I can more or less tell you how I felt about it at the time. Assuming that this movie hasn’t become one of my favorites. 

That’s of course not even close to nostalgia, because for that you need to reach further back, to the years that ‘formed us’, to the time when there was still ‘good music’ by ‘real musicians’, movies ‘had story-lines’ and novels ‘turned your perception of the world upside-down’.

Which is also a bit besides the point. What isn’t besides the point is how it makes us feel now because how we feel at any given time will always be our sole frame of reference. If you have read any of my work, then you must have come across that notion of the narrative identity: it’s that whole idea of our personal histories as a narrative that we continuously rewrite over the years, until we have ended up with a story about ourselves that we can ‘live with’, but also one that makes us ‘feel good about ourselves’. And it’s exactly that last vault that nostalgia taps into. 

These vaults of nostalgia are exactly what it seems. This is what I tap into. Series: The X-files. Music: Nirvana, Radiohead, The Hives. Movies that scared me shitless: IT, Predator. Movies that somehow captured how I felt at a certain time: Hackers, Donnie Darko, The Dreamers, Shrink. Comedy: Tom Green. Computer games: C&C, Commandos.

What does this really tell you, besides that I grew up in the 90s and basically what most kids were into back then. In a way you might also say that these are more like cultural markers than anything else, but there’s a subtlety here: those markers mean something else from person to person. 

Nostalgia as a fictional device

Where nostalgia takes on a whole other dimension is where it’s being used as an intentional fictional device. And even if you know that it’s being used, the mechanism still works. Most notable works of fiction that have utilized this device are IT and The Body (better known as the movie Stand by me), the series Stranger Things, the novel The Prospector. The movie Donnie Darko, tapping into the 80s and that whole notion of teenage-angst. 

Out of all of those, I would still say that IT makes the best case of nostalgia in fiction (the horror-element is just the sauce to make the story more palatable). The nostalgia works because it makes that distinction between past and present very clear. 

Where it gets really interesting is where IT makes all these references to growing up in the 1950s, which is very unlike the 90s. I have no personal link with that kind of rock and roll, the struggles of that era or that unmitigated notion of the American Dream being just around the corner (if you just work hard enough). But the feeling of what it was like to be 12 years old ------- that’s universal, just like the extent of fooling around and all that stuff is universal as well. 

I really believe in this device, because it makes a distinction between a ‘now’ and a ‘before’. I tried to play around with this to a modest extent in The Entity with characters of different ages. In The Island I made the literal time-jump between a past when a group of friends (The Gang) was 12 years old growing up on an island, and the present where they are in their thirties and return for a reunion. In The Bird Man I used it to describe the coming of age in the footnotes of that story (but also to figure out what happens when things are really bad). In the upcoming The Caves I used it again with characters of different ages (and to figure out how things had gotten to be so bad in the first place). 

The only ‘problem’ here is that nostalgia aims backwards: before I turned 37 myself I never really had a notion of what it is actually like to be that age, but looking back I do understand what it was like to be 30, 27, 24, 19, 17, 12 and so forth. With that in mind, nostalgia might be more powerful the older you get. 

And it’s all good, because nostalgia is the sort of positive emotion that makes you feel good about yourself. It gives you an idea that there’s some sort of narrative going on in your life, that it makes sense, that it’s just and all of those things. 

What about the snow

The only real instance where it somehow reaches beyond let’s say the 90s, or the notion of what it was like to be 12 years of age is the time when there’s snow. If you live in a place where there’s snow every winter, you might not really get this ------- but where I live there’s no snow. Where I grew up there’s only a good bit of snow every 5-10 years for just a few days up to a few weeks. 

That’s the kind of snow that’s really special, and it absolutely is of the sort that there’s nothing quite like it. There are mostly fond memories around it with family and friends, because you will have to make the most of it -------- especially since it’s rare and only there for a short time. 

And that’s even though it literally gets in between everything. It literally disrupts. It changes sight and sound. It contracts time, because you will remember the last time that there was snow and things were so-and-so. 

Then you might say: why not go some place where there ‘is’ snow, but that just isn’t the same. It just doesn’t have the same quality, because then it’s something that’s always there. And what’s more: it’s not a collective memory that you share with everyone around you. 

Wrapping up

Maybe, when looking at it closer, it’s not actually nostalgia, because it’s recurring in exactly the same way every few years. What we usually consider nostalgia (90s, X-Files, Nirvana) is the stuff that has gone and it meant something to us at a certain time and place, and that’s the reason why it makes us feel a certain way when going back there and in some form remembering and reliving those days. 

A key distinction might then be that nostalgia is something that you can return to on and off, and not something that only comes around every now and then. Nostalgia is something to look for, and for good reason it’s sometimes that childhood is referred to as that ‘vast vault of memories’. 

Key points

- nostalgia is a sort of collective memory that brings us back to a certain time and place, and it makes us feel a certain way.

- nostalgia is a sort of memory that has gone through a sieve that has taken out all the bad pieces to bring us closer to a narrative about ourselves that we can live with.

- nostalgia is a powerful positive emotion that makes you feel good about yourself, it links back to simpler times, it gives you this notion that there’s some sort of narrative going on in your life and makes you feel that things somehow make sense.

Continue reading

Two graves in the desert: stories to tell in the dark
On the desert, The X-Files and scary stories.


Loyalty to a region: gurps cyberpunk
Why cyberpunk works and what keeps us coming back for more.


Desert Blue: we were somewhere around Barstow
On the desert as a refuge, a state of mind and a place of inspiration.

12 Monkeys: why we exhaust all alternatives before doing the right thing

I recently read an article that gave a lot of insight into 12 Monkeys (the movie, 1995), and by extension also into the series (2013) which follows much of the same story-line. The story in a nutshell: the world has been devastated because of a virus and it has caused global collapse in every possible way (famine, climate change, poverty) and it has forced people to live underground. The 12 Monkeys are a group that are believed to have released the original virus. Scientists figured out a way to travel back in time to retrieve an original sample of the virus in order to create a vaccine. 

Now that we have all been through something similar, although not to the extent that’s laid out in the 12 Monkeys ---- the story doesn’t seem so far fetched. Just imagine that the recent global tensions caused here and there caused a global war, in turn causing a complete collapse in the global supply chain ------ and not just a global unavailability of consumer goods, but also famine, throwing countries back ‘a hundred years’, withdrawing policies to mitigate climate change, nuclear missiles being launched here and there, accelerating not just climate change with rising temperatures, but a complete collapse. 

It’s a stretch to imagine that this would ever happen, but the reality is that we have never been so close since the beginning of the cold war, and since the global trend to have consumer goods produced at very low prices in countries with cheap labor (China), which in some way must have kept things together. Although, there might also be a good case to increase production at home through 3d-printing and highly automated factories, but that’s on a side-note. 

More about the monkeys

The article explores the back-story of the 12 Monkeys, chronicling what made it such a challenge to get the movie made, and also about cues in the world at large and the inspiration drawn from the personal lives of its authors. 

The idea to get an original strain from a virus was a current idea at the time and it was turned into reality as well: scientists actually retrieved a sample of the original Spanish-flu-virus out of the permafrost in Norway that had brought the world to its knees, some 70 years prior. 

The authors had also spend time working in a psychiatric institution, and during their time there were frequent protests by animal-rights-groups outside of this facility. This became the 12 Monkeys. Where the story works better than other time-travel-movies, is that they have this notion that the past already took place: their presence in it will not dramatically impact the future. 

I personally like the series more than the movie, because it has more suspense and it gives a better notion of the impossibility of the situation that they had found themselves in (plague, famine, nature collapse), but also that other small notion that even if time travel was possible, it might actually still be close to impossible to dodge what was about to come down inevitably. 

The idea of the whole story was to get a live strain of the virus, with the idea in mind to develop a vaccine based on that. It does raise the question though: how did it all end up in that place to begin with? Or to para-phrase it: how could it have gotten so far out of hand?

Exhausting every possible alternative

Some time ago I read this statement about the US government that they will always exhaust every possible alternative before doing what needs to be done in the first place. I’m not sure why it was related to the US government, because it seems to be a universal principle in the same vein as that in any organization the number of people who do most of the work can be estimated by the square root of the number of employees. 

It’s one of those instances where you might want things not to be so, but when it comes down to it: you can’t go much against human nature, not when it comes to the private, and not when it comes to the social. That’s why it totally makes sense to draw that comparison.

In an organization of 100 folks it’s about 10 folks who do most of the work. In an organization of 40 folks, it’s about 6 folks. The larger the organization, the bigger the chances are of just being able to coast by and not do too much of anything (or at least, not having to work too hard). 

When it comes to work, it’s hard to argue that this is ‘bad’, because there are different folks with vastly different skill-sets. Besides, most of us are okay with doing what is required and calling it George, because when it comes down to it: you work to live your life, right?

In much of that same vein; we have all been there when we started out with our first job: spending money and partying like crazy; and basically living paycheck to paycheck. It’s a lot of fun while it lasts, and you should definitely enjoy when you’re in a stretch like that, but at some point you start realizing that it’s pretty unsustainable. 

At first you may try to figure out how to keep up that life-style, you explore every possible alternative before doing what you should have done from the start: minimize debt, budget and invest. 

Where this instance is different is that there’s no way around that little fact that you have to do what needs to be done at some point in time. And that’s where it borders on that other notion of figuring out what you ultimately want out of life, which depends on your definition of ‘success’ and when you want to have accomplished in terms of ‘this-and-that’. 

The fact of the matter is though that there will always be some past that takes time to get undone, if it can get undone. If you amassed debt during those first few years, it will take you some time to pay it all back, but it can be undone. On the other hand; if you contracted, let’s say, some sort of chronic disease, or you destroyed a part of your body, then it’s a different matter entirely.

The personal, the social and the city-organism

In The Bird Man I played around with this idea how a city that has been sliding down in every possible way can create a breeding ground for a lot of bad stuff to happen. At the time it seemed to me that this was one of the big questions of 2020, not just because of the plague, but also because of Trump and the rise of right-wing politics in general.

This year it seems slightly less dramatic, with Biden elected and global politics having receded to the middle (although that might be temporary). That’s more or less how I shifted that notion in The Caves away from being in a situation where things are already bad, towards how things could have gone so terribly wrong in the first place. I believe that this is one of the big questions that has to be figured out when life is about to return back to normal. Which makes it more or less one of the big questions of 2021.

And this is where all of this ties back to the plague and how we ended up there in the first place. It’s so obvious that it’s almost silly to point out: not enough resources have been dedicated to controlling and defeating viral outbreaks on a global level. Despite the fact that a vaccine based on modified rna has been in development for over 20 years. Despite the fact that there were institutions that rolled out as soon as the word of the plague has come about. 

The whole point here is that it ties in to all those bigger issues: climate change, global waste and ultimately an unfair distribution of wealth. Ultimately it’s just another example of exhausting every alternative, before doing what needed to be done in the first place. 

But it gives some sort of twisted understanding of the other end: if you’re cornered and with your back against the wall ------ things seem different. Maybe that’s a whole other layer to the 12 Monkeys: a destruction out of which to rebuild, only then things got out of control. Maybe, when all was said and done, that is what those 12 Monkeys had on their mind even though they might not even have been aware of this themselves.

Key points:

- 12 Monkeys is a great story, especially the series because it has more suspense

- the plague could have been much worse

- ultimately you can’t go against human nature in the private, or the social

- in most organizations, most work is done by a small group of people (square root of total number of employees)

- exhausting every alternative before doing what needs to be done is a universal human tendency

Continue reading

Two graves in the desert: stories to tell in the dark
On the desert, The X-Files and scary stories.


Loyalty to a region: gurps cyberpunk
Why cyberpunk works and what keeps us coming back for more.


Desert Blue: we were somewhere around Barstow
On the desert as a refuge, a state of mind and a place of inspiration.

Two graves in the desert: stories to tell in the dark

It’s as they say: all at the right time. That’s more or less what I did, and also much of the reason why I didn’t really post anything in the last three weeks. 

Short update though: in the interim I finished the second draft of a novel that I plan to have out there in May of this year. Title: The Caves, sideways inspired by the plague of 2020. More about that at a later time (or click the link here if you’re interested to find out more).

On to the desert, two graves and scary stories

We’re not done with the desert as yet though; that vast unforgiving region, the locale of tall tales, folklore and legend. The territory of The X-Files, Westerns, prospecting and the closest resemblance to what life might be like in outer space: dry, dusty and miserably hot (depending on which direction you go, obviously).

There’s something about it though, about a place that’s intrinsically hostile to life in every possible way. A lack of water, a lack of fertile soil and a lack of a decent temperature. Basically: a lack of a lot of the comforts of our everyday lives. Hang out there long enough though and the thing that you had never expected actually happens: it gets under your skin. 

This isn’t so much because you get hooked on the hardship, because that never gives way. It also isn’t the incessant heat or the fine dust that gets in between everything. What does happen is that you start to live around corners. You take on a slower pace. You shift your attention towards different things. You take on more of a can-do mentality. That’s when things start taking shape of which you’d never thought it possible before. 

This is also where it ties in to our current times, where we need to do more legwork to redefine some of the things that made us who we are. Or those things that we always considered as a well established part of how we see ourselves in the greater scheme of things. 

That may sort of be what’s in the middle when a lot of unnecessary stuff just kind of falls away, and it’s then that you realize how little you really need to make ends meet. 

The X-Files, Westerns and all other fiction

That whole notion of the desert as a place to return to, on and off, may just be most of the reason why it’s so powerful as a base-line in many works of fiction. Having grown up in the 90s, it most notably ties in with Area 51 and The X-Files. It really was the show to watch back in those days with a new episode every Thursday night at 8.30 pm. 

The pilot of The X-Files starts in the Nevada desert, Area 51, at night, observing unidentified flying objects. It stated the whole dilemma of the protagonist, because he isn’t just obsessed with alien life, but he believes that his younger sister was actually abducted by aliens. That, and other unexplained phenomena like strange creatures that live here and there ------- all that gave more than enough room to play with and for things to be figured out.

That’s exactly where it ties in with that whole other notion of the desert, with wanting to find some sort of truth and all that stuff: it’s as much about what’s known as about what’s unknown. Much like life and such isn’t just about what’s at the surface, but it’s as much about what’s known and unknown, and all of that stuff that’s between the lines. And then it moved on, and it returned on and off.

Westerns are a case apart 

Then there are times when I watch a ton of westerns, or skim through, because that era was also one of pulp fiction, with some stories that were as thin as cardboard and a re-iteration of the same thing over and over, and with lines that never really stick. Except for something like this, maybe, “If you plan to take revenge Mr, you better dig two graves.”

On some level, I think that those stories are more about hardship as an idea, but also that other folks have it more rough than us. It’s also about a ‘before’ when things were simpler.

That’s to say that the desert can be a hard place, and not a place to work up a sweat over things that aren’t ultimately important. That’s at least one take on it, and that’s good advise for any time. It’s also a contradiction, because a desert can also be a place of vast riches when it comes to prospecting and all such things. But you have to know where to look.

The actual desert

The desert is also a place of campfires under a sky with more stars than the eye can count. It’s where those tall tales come back in and where we connect back to the ancients. In a way, that’s always something to look for: that link that ties us back to a distant past, not just because it helps us see our place in the greater scheme of things, but because it’s something that will always be there.

That’s the link and that’s the continuity, which is always one step behind, but it will always be more current than the most modern man-made structure, be it some great structure, or a prefab hotel where we spend a few nights when vacationing.

That’s where a campfire in the desert becomes a preferred place for stories that are best told in the dark, the kind of stories that have always been told around campfires, about rogue men or restless spirits that are out for revenge, sadistic murderers that lives in the hills or a group of folks that have come out to this very same desert, and it turned out that one person in the group started to have certain tendencies. If you go rogue anywhere, it might just as well be the desert, right?

That’s not the point though, and maybe it never was: even in a gore-horror-flick it’s never so much about all the bad stuff, but it’s more about a place that opens your mind to other possibilities. That’s where a monster isn’t just a monster----------.

In summary

- our current times tie into the desert, because we currently need to do more legwork to redefine some of the things that define who we are.

- the desert is interesting because it’s intrinsically hostile to life.

- a story told under the stars in the desert isn’t just a story, because the desert in itself is a place that opens your mind to other possibilities

Continue reading

Loyalty to a region: gurps cyberpunk
Why cyberpunk works and what keeps us coming back for more.


Desert Blue: we were somewhere around Barstow
On the desert as a refuge, a state of mind and a place of inspiration.


Shrink (2009)
Under-rated movie on therapy, self-obliteration and ultimately life.