Nostalgic Wormholes

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...