The Past Is a Foreign City

You reach a point in life where you become sort of embarrassed to be who you are. You look back at your aspirations and wonder if maybe they weren’t yours at all; maybe they were borrowed from someone else, or maybe they were sold to you by a sinister culture industry. I am a product of my time and nothing more. I did not transcend any of the embarrassing pitfalls of my era, nor did I identify any of its obvious dangers. Consider our youth examined through the cynical lens of the present day: was twee indie rock culture something imposed from the top down, a means of getting the American populace to retreat into a fantasy of prolonged childhood and look away from the scandal of the Patriot Act, the Global War On Terror, a Great Recession from which we have not yet recovered?

Garden State, 2004. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, also 2004. Zooey Deschanel marrying Ben Gibbard — they woke up in the morning and did their bangs together. Even back then, of course, I thought I was too cool for all this. Only, of course, to do what everyone else did and move to Brooklyn in search of my very own Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Only to succumb, like any good adult, to eventual disillusionment and skepticism. All of my friends have either invested too much into their dreams and have found themselves locked out of a hostile economy, or have invested too much into their careers and have lost all sight of their prior dreams. No matter which path you chose to take, both were doomed to a kind of failure.

So why did we buy into this dream to begin with? Who sold it to us, and why? This promise of culture, the adventure of life in a city that was gentrified enough to be safe but not so much that it had become homogeneous and alienating. Was it all a trap to lure idealistic suburban youths into indentured urban servitude? I ride the subway feeling, inexplicably, as if I am wearing the humiliating uniform of a fast food employee. Was I tricked? Is it all a big scam? I understand how internet commentators, younger or older than myself, might think so. But it can’t be; it was real, I was there.