NINETEEN-90’s

There’s plenty of documentation of me deep meandering through the 80’s. An airy nostalgia of possibilities, relived through the rosiest of rose colored Vuarnets. If you took my word for it, you’d have thought my teens were like Sixteen Candles where the nerd always gets the girl right after he’s crushed Ivan Drago and single handedly knocked down the Berlin Wall. I mean it was kind of like that. I did get to visit the actual USSR, though I’m not sure if my Girbaud’s had any affect on Glasnost. We will just say yes, yes they did. 

The magic of that decade seemed to disappear on January 1st, 1990. A New Year’s Day I have zero recollection of, but one I’m sure was ushered in with the same lackluster party and cemented NYE as the most overrated of all nights to go out.  Kids these days will never know the boredom of “riding around” hoping to run into someone who knew of someone who was having a party. Spoiler alert. Almost no one was.  

I entered that decade as a 19 year old, uninspired by college (a phenomena I’m witnessing in real time) and if I can look at it objectively, not too different than I am now. Full of dreams of something more, not really sure how to get there, mildly dissatisfied with every second of life on the in between. This can’t be right, I know, it’s impossible for thirty years to pass without change, but life can feel the same when we try and look back at a different time. I just think it’s the wiring. 

The thing that does remain the same is the dissatisfaction or at the least my perception of it. A fog of lostness hanging over a lot of things. School especially. Nothing really interested me but music, yet I wasn’t an avid practitioner of it. I wanted the attention attached, not a knowledge of the form or the building blocks of what would make me proficient. I wanted the shortcut to the top. Hey 19 year old me. There are no short cuts. 

No time on this earth is truly a waste but if we are scoring our decades and years as some countdown of the “Top 50 Years of Pat Fellows’s Life”, a lot of the cellar dwellers would be in the 90’s. Again. This has to be due to some sort of reversal of the glasses worn above. I got to do a lot of cool things and the relationships and impact of those years remain today, so it can’t be all bad. Whereas the 80’s felt just like they looked, neon bright and light with possibilities, the 90’s feel heavy and almost insignificant in their impact.  This, if course, is an impossibility. 

One probable issue is a lack of clarity over that time. Most of my college years were spent finding that party I searched for on the last day of the 90’s. A constant night after night search for something. Followed by days of not doing the things I was in town to do, further my education. 

I say this, but I was learning. I learned a lot from 89-94. I learned how to position myself in social circles, I learned how to become a better (albeit not great) musician and songwriter. To that end I got to play in front of hundreds of people and on at least one occasion, thousands. I learned how to take black and white pictures, develop my own film and make prints from the negatives, I learned to wait tables, to bartend and make money. I learned that I had a knack for writing and created a small business of reading peoples assignments and completing papers for them. I ended up with a degree despite my best efforts. I drove all over Mississippi and Louisiana and once to Canada, with an atlas that rode behind my seat, never once getting lost and on another occasion decided to take the Natchez Trace, end to end to go to a friends wedding, exiting the trace a mile or so from his apartment, in Nashville. I recorded two albums, moved to Texas and back and jumped out of an airplane. I met the woman of my dreams, fell in love and am married to the same some 20 years later. 

So the 90’s must be deemed, by any scoring system you have access to, an overwhelming success. 

The problem is that we (I) always seem to try and apply the scoring system after the fact as well as juxtapose it against what we’ve been told and taught “life and success” looks like. We were to go to college and be something when we grew up. Lawyers, doctors, architects, and all sorts of noble professions that the world had set up for us, tiny boxes, squeezing us into something the previous generation had decided was the way. If I had a dollar for every second I’ve regretted not fitting into those boxes I’d be sitting in some sort of mountain retreat writing this, preparing for my day at some sort of “set time job” likely hating every second.   

I’ve no sooner finished the above paragraph that I know it’s a load of garbage.  While I do wonder if I could have smashed myself into those boxes, tucking in the sides of my life so it would fit, I also know that I’d have never survived. 

While a part of me longs for the structure of the “real world”, hindsight at its best is convenience.  We almost always look back through someone else’s version of the world and rate accordingly. This is idiotic. Just because the world is plummeting forward in a certain box doesn’t mean that it’s the “right” way. It’s a way.  

I was listening to a podcast called People I Mostly Admire hosted by Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame. It’s mostly a collection of the uber smart and overly accomplished and to that end it’s just as equally discouraging as one might think. The interview on this episode wasn’t what caught me though. In the beginning he speaks about how he was asked to facilitate a conversation at his table at a conference. Unimpressed with the list of questions provided, he instead gave each person 5 mins to tell their life story but with one caveat. They could not be modest or self deprecating and instead be braggadocios to borderline arrogant. To tell their life history from the point of view of the actual accomplishments in all their glory. This may actually be how the world sees us. Right?  

In that light, only accomplishments, most of us can’t help but shine and as such, the 90’s may have been some of my shiniest days. Everything looks opaque when viewed through a negative lens, yet that’s how most of us view everything. Should haves, could haves. All of it pulling us away from where we are and from what’s ahead. 

This morning, I’m trying to remind myself to look forward and to be present. To be proud of what I’ve accomplished, and to let the chin beard of 1992 fade with the poor choices I made. 

#hugsandhi5s