As the nostalgia-driven Best of the Decade lists start to accumulate like so many piles of plowed December snow (NB: it rarely if ever actually snows in Virginia in December), it also occurs to me that the past ten years are the first decade in my personal chronology to not be rigidly defined by school:
I was born in late 1974 and my memories of the first four-plus years of my life are totally indistinct; in fact 'memories' is just a word I use as shorthand for 'a bunch of family stories I've heard and photographs I've seen that roughly interconnect'. A lot of that time seems like a dream, only half of which I can recollect, with most of that not making a lot of sense. Any personal notion of the 70's that I have is much more informed by talking about it, reading about it, seeing it on TV and in the movies, etc.
Kindergarten was the 1979-1980 school year so my version of the 80's is very tidily wrapped up in elementary and middle school and capped by my freshman year of high school. Kindergarten is right about where my memories start to take on real weight, and where I feel like the scenes are all starring me, not just a generic toddler that could really be anybody. In my own personal universe, the soundtrack of the early 80's is all radio-friendly pop music: Journey, Michael Jackson, the Doobie Brothers, Culture Club. The late 80's is much heavier stuff: Van Halen (Hagar-fronted), Metallica, Beastie Boys, Guns 'n' Roses. I know this is almost entirely due to the fact that for the first five years of the 80's I was a little kid basically taking my entertainment cues from my parents, whereas once I got to middle school I had a lot more freedom, not to mention my own boom box (soon upgraded with a CD player) which all meant I could follow the lead of my friends and peers instead, but I swear that my recollections reflect some kind of music business trends as well.
Middle school was also when I made the jump to full-on comic book nerd. My mom would drop me off at the middle school on her way to work, well before the homeroom bell, and there was a strip mall next to the middle school with a convenience store at the end. Every morning afforded plenty of time to walk over there, browse their comic book racks and buy a couple (when there were new ones I was interested in) and make it back to school. I made that circuit every single schoolday, and since comic shipments only came once a week and any given title only once a month, most days I left without spending money at all - but on days when comics did arrive I got them at the earliest possible opportunity, which is a habit I maintained well into this decade. As it happened, right about at the midpoint of the 80's the biggest events (to that point) in comics were published: Secret Wars and Crisis on Infinite Earths. So my deep immersion in them more or less coincided with a rising tide of a whole flood of crazy. A lot of people have said, "oh, I used to be into comics as a kid, but, you know, then I discovered girls." I think the hooks comics got into me in those late 80's days were part of the reason why I couldn't let them go even when I, too, got into girls (or I should say, since I always thought girls were desirable companions, when they started getting into me).
The 90's were dominated by high school and college for me, and I think that most people summoning up the archetypes of that decade would probably pull something out that originated in my college years, 1992-1996, also known as President Clinton's first term. I know everyone has the tendency to see themselves as dynamic figures at the center of historical moments in time, but even acknowledging how inherently schlocky that is can't stop me from feeling that the fall of 1992 was totally rad: I went away to college and a month later turned 18 and a month after that voted in the election of Slick Willie (it seemed like a good idea at the time, and even in retrospect strikes me as the best of the three options). High school mostly taught me about traditions and social hierarchies, while college was geared towards egalitarianism and new ideas, and I suppose it's just as well that I was exposed to both because the real world tends to split the difference and reward an understanding of how to play by either set of rules as circumstances demand. To the debatable extent that I enjoy any kind of entertainment which might be labeled or marketed as "indie", I owe it to everything I was exposed to in the mid-90's.
I also met my wife in college, and only wish I had realized who she was meant to be at the time.
In the waning years of the 90's I still felt very much like I was in college, living in a house with multiple roommates, moving once a year, hanging out with the exact same people I had hung out with in school. I moved to Virginia to keep my college social structures more or less intact and recognizable. Even my ill-advised and ill-fated first marriage just feels like the grand finale in my Stupid College Mistakes exhibition.
The really striking thing about looking back at the current decade, thus, is the notable absence of school. No summer vacations to break up the monotony. No succession of teachers or professors to delineate one set of seasons from the next. If you asked me when a movie like Iron Eagle came out, I could at least build a convincing case for what year I think it was, based on how well I remember my friends and I drawing embarrassingly jingoistic pictures of Libya-bound F-16s in the middle school cafeteria circa sixth grade (so ... 1985, since I didn't see it until it was on VHS?). Ask me what year Fight Club came out and the best I could do is a total shot in the dark (2002? Definitely before 2004, because that's when I bought my house and my own DVD player and started building my DVD library, including Fight Club.). There are signposts beyond school, of course. Changing jobs, buying aforementioned houses, the impossible-to-overstate-the-importance-of marrying the right person and having a baby, but those are more randomly spaced out, not nearly as predictable or easy to remember as "last digit of year equals grade I finished that June."
Somehow I've made it through a whole decade without the temporal mnemonics I grew up with, and it's tempting to say that I'm about to embark on another first. After the Elementary/Middle School Decade, the High School/College Decade, and the Professional Career Decade (for lack of a better term), I'm now staring down the barrel of ... Professional Career Decade II! For the first time in my life, the coming decade is going to be a lot more similar than dissimilar to the one before, especially the latter half of the 00's. Tempting to say, but probably not true. For one thing, I'll be raising a child (at least one, hopefully more?) and for another I'll be a newly-minted landlord (though please, Frigga willing, let that only be true for two or three years at most) and for a third ... you just never know how life is going to proceed. You make your best guess and plan accordingly, but the only thing I'm willing to bet on is that the 10's will have more in them that I didn't see coming than I did.
Anyway, I'm predisposed to be nostalgic as it is (I really enjoy the hell out of end-of-year Best Of lists, and I always feel bad for years ending in 9 because they get shafted in favor of end-of-decade retrospectives) so be forewarned that the blogging will almost certainly drift in that direction as the year winds down, and also be advised that it's a weird kind of nostalgia this time around.
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