I am posting this from an airplane. 

I am soaring 37,000 feet above the surface of the earth at hundreds of miles per hour, able to wirelessly connect to a world wide network that allows instantious communication with people in different countries and different cultures from the other side of the globe.  I am listening to independantly produced audio fiction from authors in and genres I'd never would have been interested in if not for said network on a device that can store more music than 9000 CDs.  The flash storage device in my pocket can store thousands of the greatest written works of mankind.  My cell phone, another pocket device, has more than double (at least) the processing power of the transport that took people to the moon and back.

I live in the future.

I vow never to take any of this for granted, ever.

Why I Love Pittsburgh

So here's the TL;DR version of the past 30 years of my life.  Born in Cleveland, parents move to Buffalo, at age 16 move back to Cleveland, go to a college in Erie, PA, move back to Cleveland after college in 2002, move back to Erie a year later, then move down to Pittsburgh in March 2006.

Around October 2006, I realized that I'd fallen in love with the city.

Now, I'll be the first to admit there might be another reason why I love the city that isn't wholly based on the city itself.  I had moved to Cleveland in the middle of my high school years, so I had have a good reason to dislike the Ohio city, and Pittsburgh is an entire city that doesn't traditionally like Cleveland.  

So yeah, I am a little biased.  But that alone isn't why I think of the 'Burgh as my home.

The thing that really hit upon me was the attitude and sense of identity of the city.  Of the other places I've lived, Cleveland and Buffalo both have an overarching mood of 'woe is me'.  Which to be fair is merited.  All four of the Rust Belt cities I've lived in have already had their Golden Age during the height of American manufacturing, which is long past in this global age.  The two big Lake Erie cities are generally like the former high school jock who now works some soulless, demeaning service job; always talking about how good it was back in the day and lamenting the fact that things have changes and the world has moved on.

Pittsburgh's identity is drastically different.  It has had its own devastating industrial crash as well (I think there is one steel mill still functioning in the Iron City) but the folks here don't seem to lament the past but revere it.  It's a small difference -- one recalls history and longs for a return to it, the other recalls history and honors it for what it was -- but it is a powerful one.  One looks back, the other looks forward having learned and improved.

I live in a section of Pittsburgh called Shadeyside.  It's a nice little slice of the city, with a bunch of older, mixed style houses and a main business drag with a lot of small coffee shops and eateries.  Right next to me is Bloomsfield, sort of the 'Little Italy' of the city, with its own main drag of Italian eateries and what not.  Lauranceville, Squirrel Hill, North Shore, Friendship, all of these are parts of the same city that have such a unique feel, but are 10-15 minute drives.  If you're from a larger city like D.C., L.A. or New York, this may seem a bit pedestrian, but none of the other cities I've lived in have had so many unique feelings and locations all within the same metro area.

I guess the simplest way to explain it is this.  Driving from the airport to the city, you have to go through one of the many tunnels around Pittsburgh.  When you emerge on the other side, especially at night, you get one of the best views of the city.  A lot of 'Burghers talk fondly of the times they've brought their family and friends through the tunnel for the first time.  As you cross the Fort Pitt bridge, you see the heart of downtown Pittsburgh right in front of you, lit up if it's night.  There are a lot of older brick buildings standing among the shinier steel structures and castle-like glass spires of PPG place.  It's not as sexy as New York City's skyline, or as iconic as Paris or St. Louis', but it doesn't claim to be.  If you can see the appeal of it as it is, not as others want it to be, you can instantly see what make Pittsburgh attractive to me as my home.

I went to a reunion of sorts last weekend.  Other people called it a Pez convention, but I know better.

I split my high school years between Buffalo, New York and Cleveland, Ohio.  But I grew up on the Pezheads email mailing list.  Way back in 1997, as I was entering my senior year of high school I started my path down Pez collecting.  The story behind that is really innocent, it happened at band camp.  (Yes, innocent and band camp can happen, despite what certain movies may have you believe).  Tradition stated that any package sent to kids at camp had to be opened up in front of everyone, so parents would send silly things to their kids to embarrass them.  My parents sent me Pez, because I had found 2 or 3 from my younger years and started setting them up on my desk because they looked neat.

So our band director opened my package, had this WTF look on his face when he saw Pez.  Me, being the quiet and subtile creature I was back then, screamed PEZ!, ran up to the front of the auditourm, grabbed my candy dispensers and ran back to my seat. 

Everyone got a good laugh.  But people started calling me the Pez man because of that little outburst.  And because I was such a confused, lonely kid looking for any kind of identity back then, I embraced it.  I started buying dispensers at grocery stores, people started giving me their old dispensers, things were good.

Then I got online to find out more info about my new hobby.  I didn't really realize what I was getting into.  After learning about vintage Pez dispensers, pieces of plastic that instantly became objects of my covetous desire, I found the Pezheads e-mail list.

Now, now a days, e-mail lists, or listservs, are reguarded as old in internet terms, grouped in with the Moasic browser, Kermit file transfers (Which I used in the Lynx browser), and the Gopher protocol.  You subscribe to a listserv, and a message sent to a single address will be sent out to everyone on the list.

Pezheads was a medium sized list at the time, and I lurked there for a while before starting to join in the conversations there.  I soon realized I was a young 18 year old punk kid surrounded by adults and even in some cases grandparents. 

This came as a bit of a shock to me, as back in 1997 I didn't know anyone over the age of 22 who could easily use things like e-mail or the internet.  Even more shocking was how people treated me.  With the shared interest and only screen names to go from, I felt rather accepted among these adults. 

Not to say that I was not the most mature among them, I still was an selfish asshole of a teen.  I eventually translated that goofy behavior into things like Pez song parodies and jokes.  In the midst of normally serious discussion about Pez variations, new releases, celebrations of finding a $500 dispenser at a yard sale for 25 cents, there I was posting conversations between myself and Celes, my talking snow(wo)man dispenser in a Letterman-esque dialog and parodies of American Pie and One Week revolving around Pez.

I also discovered that there were Pez conventions, and wouldn't you know it, the world's largest one, Pez-a-Mania, was held in Cleveland, my backyard, every year.  For five years, from 1998 to 2002, I went to Pez-a-Mania.  Every year I went, the amount of people I wanted to see, and who want to see me, grew.  I was never a social creature by any stretch of the imagination, except for my yearly Pez prom in Cleveland.  My Pez friends were also surragate aunts and uncles.

After I graduated college and moved back home, my little Pez illusion was shuttered.  I couldn't display my collection like I once had, I didn't have the free time to keep up with the e-mail list, and I didn't have as much extra cash as I did in college, silly things like rent and food and those other real life bills taking away my Pez budget.

So for a while, I went dark to the Pez community.  I never got rid of my collection, it was too much a part of who I was, who I still am today, but they sat prisoner in plastic bins for years until about 2 years ago.

It was a casual immersion back into my old life.  The loose dispensers came out first, those were the easiest to set up.  My carded dispensers took a bit more effort, so they went up next.  Then I started lurking on the Pez list again.  The first posts after my return were, I am not kidding, a 4 part story written in second person based in the Cthulhu mythos, blended with Pez dispensers.  It involved Celes, my talking snow(wo)man dispenser and was the origin of the word Haskonomicon.

All this lead to me going to Pez-a-Mania in 2009, but I got there late, could not mingle with as many people, and leading to an over all less than stellar experience.  But so many things had changed that it was still worth it.  I was able to learn the layout of the hobby from the shadows, who was still active, who wasn't, that sort of thing.

This year, July 2010, was my real homecoming to the Pez community and the convention.  So many times during Pez bingo, during room hopping, and during the time in the dealer's room on Saturday, people would stop my, say, "Oh my god, it's Mike Hasko.  Look at you, how've you been?"  And I'd catch up with all these people I used to admire from afar.  But it was different, before I couldn't grasp the rigors of adulthood, working, bills, sacrificing the things you want to do so the things you need to do are fulfilled.  Now I could chat about my job, honestly listen and care about theirs.

I had grown up, they had remained the same. 

A few friends of mine and I would always joke about the people who would return to their high school and college homecoming events.  It seemed really sad that some people would care so much about those times to willingly want to return and relive it.  But I think I understand it now, having had a homecoming that honestly spoke to me.  Sometimes you need to be reminded of what you were to see just how far you've come, how certain things that were once important are now trivial, and the little things you didn't focus on were the ones you should.

For a lot of people, all that is the innocent trappings of high school.  For me, it's my Pez collector family.

So I fell down a wormhole the other day.  Don't worry, I didn't hurt myself, and I made it through alright.  But I did lose hours of my evening to this inconveniently placed vortex, and the worst part about is, I never saw it coming.  That's not too much of a surprise though, because with wormholes, you never do see them coming.  They're sneaky bastards like that, invisible to all the world until you sit down one day, not expecting it, and there you are, falling down the rabbit hole, waving to Alice and the White Rabbit as they fly past.

Now, this was not wormholes as theorized by Einstein, or something like you would see on Star Trek.  The wormhole didn't take me across space, I never really left my living room to be honest.  But time, yeah, there was some temporal displacement involved in this wormhole.

Looking back on it, I should've seen it coming, if I'm honest with myself.  I started at the nexus of so many of these wormholes.  Youtube.  I was trying to find a song whose chorus was stuck in my mind, playing on infinite loop; the devil's own iPod shuffle option.  By the time I'd clicked on the third link to another remake of said song, only then did I realize I was already sucked down a nostalgia wormhole, and there was nothing I could do to salvage the rest of my evening except ride it out.

Songs from the 90's, from the 'I was awkward but so was everyone else I knew' phase of my life, was the theme of this trip.  Deadeye Dick's "New Age Girl", Boyz 2 Men II album, Green Jelly, Lisa Loeb's "You Say", and 69 Boys' "Tootsee Roll" were just some of the songs I listened through their entirety.  With these songs playing I instantly flashed back to middle school dances, trips to the beach, and after school conversations sitting on the half-wall outside our high school that I had forgotten for years.  

Some say scent is the sense that ties most to memory, but late 80's and early 90's music gives hearing a run for its money in my case.

A lot of these memories are relatively inconsequential in the large scheme of things, discussions about gossip or homework, chaff in the wheat field of English discourse.  But is the sudden rush of faces and voices from those conversations that really floored me.  

The wormhole changed directions then, the blue and white lowercase f of Facebook branding the next part of this trip.  Look at that, Dustin's still living in town.  Derek and Katie got married, never saw those two hooking up.  Crystal just had a kid.  Youtube and Facebook fueled this engine of nostalgia until it spat me out onto my living room floor.  Which, to be honest, I had been the entire time, stretched out on my stomach tapping away at my laptop just like I used to read books in middle school.

I'm relatively sure plenty of others have falling into one of these historical vortexes, loosing hours or entire days trying to catch up.  And it really hit me.  I mentioned one time before how nostalgia resistant my generation is, but I may have to replace that with nostalgia proof.  My past, the music, people, and discussions, can instantly merged my present, without having to leave my living room.  And my generation is probably going to be the last to have any sense of what we think nostalgia, as we think of it, feels like.

In the past, things that triggered nostalgia were shared stories around a fire; tales of the old told to the young.  Later, nostalgic artifacts, like letters, then pictures, then home movies could only be uncovered with some difficulty.  Letters saved could be lost, pictures were either rarely taken due to difficulty or so plentiful that they became shoved into shoe boxes, retrieved only for special projects and only after hours or days of searching.  Super 8 movies and VHS camcorded events were brought up at large gathering.  

Now-a-days, we can record the mundane instead of the supreme, and it all can be uploaded to Flickr or Youtube as soon as it's done.  Everything is tagged by time, date, location, making the filtering of all this information simple.  And everything can be viewed at any time by handheld devices that can then get into communication with whoever you want in a variety of ways.

In other words, all the things that build nostalgia, things that place gaps between when something happened and when you later think about it, are being short circuited.

I don't know if that's a good thing or not.  I mean, no longer losing hours to memories of the past is all well and good, but there can be a lot of good, warm feelings wrapped up in a nostalgia wormhole.  Time will tell, I guess...