The Ever-Evolving Emotional Texture of Our Past

How to Live With Nostalgia

Admiring your past is one thing, to become beholden to it is another. You can lose yourself dwelling on missed opportunities. Investor and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant once said, “Suffering leads to success by way of agency.” Personally, I work best when I have a little hate in the tank. Not the kind of hate that makes you pace around your apartment in a manic frenzy and play out old arguments in your head. What I’m referring to is the kind of hate that just perfectly tops you off, that allows you to repurpose your frustrations into fuel.

There is no greater motivator than reflecting on the past. Like a reliable tide, memories come rushing back; the highs and the lows. Each one brings with it a particular flavor, sound, or visual that acts as a shadow to the moment it was created. The sugary, bland taste of a gumball eye from a Spider-Man ice cream pop might be your Year 2000. The look of Sonic the Hedgehog racing across the screen of your old living room CRT television may be 1994. The sound of laughter reverberating through the halls of the now-condemned-due-to-asbestos local high school could be 2006. Your life is defined in senses.

For the individual, if taking initiative comes natural, it doesn’t always have to end at reminiscing. Nostalgia can be a formidable tool to propel yourself forward. It can push you to create—or perhaps recreate—memories for the now and beyond. These senses do not have to be unique to their time.

LOVE

When I was 20 years old, I was staring down an inevitable breakup with my high school sweetheart. We’d been together for three and a half years. I had spent every moment of those pouring myself into her, hoping to shape a future to be. But the truth was that I wasn’t wholly satisfied with where our relationship was heading. Neither was she. In fact, she was so unsatisfied with it that on her 20th birthday she disinvited me to her party and broke up with me. This was my first experience in understanding that women have uniquely cold reflexes. Beneath the sweetness of a beautiful, wholesome girl lies the capability to make horrible gestures without a second’s notice—if you wind up seeming just ‘alien’ enough to her.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t relieved about her breaking up with me. I was. I dreaded the small talk that would inevitably ensue as she opened her presents, especially with her hockey coach father who seemed to despise me.

She was adopted, and her father and his family came from old New England money. They lived in a safe and affluent neighborhood. White and quiet. I was living in the housing projects of Quincy, Massachusetts and came from a single-mother household. At 17, I deliberately tanked my grades during my senior year of high school to become eligible for night school. My poor marks and disinterest in academia had brushed off onto her: a grade-A student—before meeting me. He was right to be concerned and probably even dislike that his daughter was dating somebody like yours truly. Or at least the person I appeared to be on the surface.

Okay, maybe not just on the surface. I may have also taught her how to shoplift successfully when we were 18 years old. But that was years earlier—I was a reformed man! Am a reformed man.

The man who would become LowRes Wünderbred, circa 2008. Looking at this photo right now, I wish I could kill me. 

My sense of relief was short-lived and quickly became overshadowed by bitterness. The decision to end our relationship was significant. But to end it on her birthday was something darker and more meaningful. You don’t do that unless you are desperately wanting out. And for most people, you only desperately want out if the person you’re with is a monster (Red flag emoji!!! Look back at this article whenever I become relevant enough to get canceled) or if you have found somebody new to get excited about. I would venture to say that even if a person’s partner is a monster, they’re usually still their sole immediate resource in life for romance and for love. There is a reason why battered women have a difficult time leaving their significant others. It’s not just fear, or being chained to a radiator, it’s emotional attachment. If no parachutes are waiting in the wings, that familiarity will win out over a choice of loneliness.

In the time that lead up to our parting ways, my high school girlfriend had found a parachute: one of her managers at her retail job, a 25-year-old man named Sean. Sean was a wigger.

She worked the floor at Forever 21 three days a week. Three days became five. Five became ‘five and late nights.’ Such a hard-working girl. Weeks before the breakup, she so boldly told my mother in a morning conversation following a sleepover about a “cute guy” at her workplace. We began spending less time together.

Ultimately, I had the last laugh. This manager Sean, whom she had developed a serious crush on—and I could’ve sworn she had slept with—was gay. He married a man less than a decade later. This was not the first time that her “gaydar” had failed her. Her boyfriend right before me had also turned out to be gay, which at the time of their dating was unbeknownst to her. This was no beard situation. And hey, even I’m gay! (Just joking.) I love male genitals. (Only kidding.) Excuse me while I put on a Morrissey vinyl.

When you’re detaching the part of your identity that is embedded in another person, the natural response is either to fall apart and go sweeping into the depths of depression or to get a taste of something equivalent to a midlife crisis. It’s a rush of feeling that you have something to prove. Make no mistake, these two reactions are equally dangerous.

I’ve never been the type of guy to lay in bed all day and sulk over heartbreak. Finding opportunity in pain is a strength. But only if you have a clear set of eyes.

The opportunity in this situation, that I hadn’t been granted as a teenage boy with wild running hormones, was to play the field. Maybe I was a bad boyfriend, but I was a loyal one. Sadly, in playing the field at age 20, I wound up stepping on a landmine right out the gate. She came in the form of a ‘2011 quirky alcoholic’ BPD girl. Real BPD, not the memetic catch-all term that’s run rampant on social media to describe unruly women in their 20s. She was a wino, years older than me, who liked the works of Kassovitz, the comedy of Michael Ian Black, and read Sylvia Plath. Fundamentally a broken human being.

Our three-year age difference (which seemed like a notable gap at 20) and what I viewed at the time as her “sophisticated” taste kept me entranced. As a young man with a limited palate, I thought I was absorbing so much culture from this NYU dropout. Stupidly, I allowed that to override significant issues I had noticed from the start. Like her recreationally selling pills. Or hiding the severity of her mental illness until I had already slept over. This rebound relationship, as you could probably predict, blew up in my face.

It ended in Springfield, Massachusetts. For as long as I can remember, Springfield has been a hotbed for violent crime in New England. There had been a tumultuous argument earlier in the night at her apartment in Enfield, Connecticut. I was feeling too sick to take her to the movies to see whatever Twilight sequel was out that week. And also, it was a Twilight sequel. I was milking my coughs and sneezes. Her response to my reneging on our plan was to splash a hot cup of coffee in my face.

At 10 p.m. that evening, she dropped me off at a bus station. I had a dead cell phone in my pocket and an overstuffed backpack on my shoulder. The block looked like a page out of Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. Bums digging out of the garbage, dressed in long coats and soot-covered rags. She drove off without a goodbye.

I looked to my right. The bus station was closed. There were no businesses in sight. No subway. I stood there and soaked in the feeling of being completely fucked.

I eventually found a hotel that narrowly fit the budget of what I had in my wallet. I asked the desk clerk, clearly nervous and desperate and never having booked a hotel room before, “Hey, do you have any rooms available for under $200?” — Idiot.
“Yes, actually, we have one for $190,” she said.
“Cool, I’ll take it.”

I realized that I had left my phone charger at BPD girl’s studio. The hotel’s internet cafe was still open. I hopped on their desktop, logged into Facebook, and did my best to feign an apology for “stubbornly choosing not to go to the movies. I am so sorry! Forgive me. Please.” After about twenty minutes of attempting to lower the temperature on our disagreement, she agreed to come to the hotel. The relationship was surely over, but she intended to spend the night and make the two-hour drive to Boston for me after checkout.

The entire time I waited for her to arrive, I kept thinking about how nice it would be to have my ex-girlfriend coming to the hotel instead. We’d lay on the fresh sheets, my head on her soft, round chest and the tension in my temples unspooling into the ether. I craved it. However, what I got knocking at my door was a beast of a woman.

As a 33-year-old man, I have trouble faking my emotions for even just passing moments. As a 20-year-old man, I was eager to unload but prepared to spend the next ten hours method-acting the role of ‘apologetic, doting boyfriend.’ When she dropped me off outside my apartment the next morning, I gave her car door a hard slam and never spoke to her again.

This moment of clear bottoming out led me right back to my ex. In the days following, I sent her a lengthy cold text explaining that I knew it was unusual to hear from me, but that I’d like to arrange a meeting to mend fences. To my surprise, nothing had panned out with Sean. Imagine that. She was up for getting together for lunch. Lunch turned into a meeting at my apartment. A meeting at my apartment turned into hooking up.

People romanticize the past once a healthy distance has been established. Problems we once viewed as major can become downsized with a wider reach of experiences. In the case of my first serious relationship, we had spent less than half a year apart before deciding to come back together. It was a welcome reunion. An exciting one. When you return ‘home’ you are not just approaching the familiar, but the familiar with a fresh face.

That said, the girl I came back to was not completely the one I’d been involved with for three and a half years. That girl had been a tad bit warmer to me, and less closed off. Moreover, she was anchored to Massachusetts. This girl, while decently warm, wasn’t as open. And she wasn’t anchored anymore. Something had changed.

In the months leading up to our reunion, she had undergone a series of romantic flops. But her answer to that string of failures wasn’t to reach out to me and repair things. Her answer was to enlist in the Disney College Program and escape to Orlando, Florida. She had unlocked a part of herself without my presence that made the idea of moving out of state, away from her family and friends, palatable for the first time in her life. All the same, I felt she was worth holding onto for as long as would be allowed. What would be ‘allowed’ turned out to be one month.

In my short time reunited with her, my relationship nostalgia was quenched. We gave each other an emotional aid that was desperately needed. But I recognized that this new wedge between us wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, be pieced back together. The clock would tick down and soon she’d have a flight to catch. I went back home. She went away.

I wish this anecdote had a happy ending but unfortunately, she wound up becoming what is referred to today as a “Disney Adult.”

An AI-generated Disney Adult. ...It even got the moles and everything.

FRIENDSHIP

Not everybody is guilty of looking back on their old flings and wanting another taste; one last chance to get it right. Most people would opt for a root canal than sit down for a cup of coffee with their ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend. Before Facebook became reserved for senior citizens getting duped into spreading “wow” reacts across AI-generated images of monkeys kissing puppies, it was a useful platform to reconnect.

The heyday of digitally reuniting with your high school classmates ran from approximately 2012 to 2018. If you were a millennial who finished grade school before 2010, your graduating class would sit idle in your friend list, where you could vaguely follow the hallmarks of their lives from afar. Who moved out of town, who was making money, who was using dope, who married the once-cute-now-plump party girl.

A still from Mass State Lottery (2024), featuring Jay Karales (myself) as Rathke and Kenney Dorcely as MySpace.

I’ve been in the fortunate position to maintain friendships that I’ve had since my adolescence. One of these friends, referred to by screenwriter Ryan Jackson on his cinema talk program Mutual Aberration Society as the “Jay” to my “Silent Bob”, is actor and comedian Kenney Dorcely. Kenney has been a business staple to every creative project I’ve produced; from my directorial debut Mass State Lottery, where he took on the role of a passport counterfeiter called “MySpace” to MassacreVideo’s Omega Fish Corp. where he played a marksman from Jamaica, Queens named Carhartt.

Kenney and I have a longstanding history of performing alongside one another on camera. The first instance, dated back to 2011, was when I finally decided to take my interest in filmmaking seriously. We starred in a faux-trailer for an action/crime thriller titled Killcount. This was an official entry in the Hobo With a Shotgun - Fake Grindhouse Trailer Competition. It was shot in a day on a Sony Bloggie Touch. I truly have no recollection of what the premise to our make-believe movie was, but I was the hero and Kenney was the villain.

A still from the short film Killcount (2011); here I am with one of my favorite actresses, my late maltese Bella. 

Kenney Dorcely as actor Lajeel R. Reddenbacher, who plays "The Clown" in Killcount (2011)

I understood at an early age that, as we all grew into our adult lives, the only way to protect friendships that I found meaningful was to find ways to integrate them into my world. That came in the form of short films, podcasts, and Vines. (Remember Vines?) Many would dip their toes into the water and scramble out by the next project. Some came along for the ride and decided to grow with me. Kenney Dorcely was the most consistent example of that.

While Kenney and I had often hung out as a duo when we were teenagers, that wasn’t always the case. We were part of a rotating friend group of five boys that we referred to as “The Three Amigos.” We called ourselves that since we could never get more than 3 of us together at a time. As of 2024, that still hasn’t changed.

The summers of 2003 and 2004 were a special time. One last breath before internet culture barreled through our generation. Our go-to activity as group was watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force between games of 007: Agent Under Fire for Nintendo GameCube. Prime aughts entertainment. This would tend to commence after having finished our daily service as peer leaders at the local neighborhood center. We’d signed up for the summer to give ourselves something to do and to have access to their private pool. Another token activity was playing the strategic board game Risk, which I frequently either won at or immediately crashed and burned.

The one “Amigo” tasked with bringing the Risk board was our dear pal Gary “Gearbear” Miller. Gary is best known as the awkward, stammering performer dubbed ‘Actor Man’ for fans of CMFRT_SYSTMS. He is not what I’d consider a natural on-screen talent. He also couldn’t be less interested in anything going on behind the camera. Gary’s involvement in our sketch series CMFRT_SYSTMS was strictly polite, and we mocked him for it—for the sake of comedy.

Gary Miller in CMFRT_SYSTMS (2019) | Season 1, Episode 4 in “The Spirit of Creativity”

In 2004, Kenney moved to Florida. In 2006, Gary moved to Florida. At the top of my sophomore year of high school in 2007, I had to find myself a new friend group.

Kenney came back to Massachusetts in 2009, but Gary stayed put. He lived in St. Cloud until late 2015 and worked for Disney, like seemingly everyone in Orlando does. His return to Massachusetts in early 2016 was the first time that I had experienced connective tissue from what felt like the faraway past meld into the then-present.

We’d regularly kept in touch through phone calls and texts since his move to Florida, so meeting up was arranged with certainty. But Gary wasn’t just interested in reconnecting with Kenney and I. He wanted to touch base with everybody we had gone to school with. People that I hadn’t seen or spoken to in nearly a decade. I had gleefully moved out of the projects years earlier and here I was, climbing into Gary’s truck, and heading right back to them.

What I discovered with Gary during that time was that, although we were older and looked much different, little of substance had changed. Our friendship and our group dynamic, despite ten years having passed, was as immature and jovial as it was in the early aughts. The friends, acquaintances, and former classmates who we’d grown up with in the low-income part of Quincy, Massachusetts, by and large, also hadn’t changed. They hadn’t leveled up socially or financially. The most I can say is that at least one in five had developed a serious opioid problem. That was new. But it wasn’t a shock to anyone. You stay in the garbage dump, you become the garbage.

We hit up a couple of house parties over that year-long stretch, drinking Hennessy and doing bad coke. Every so often I would shoehorn in a shoot for what would eventually become CMFRT_SYSTMS, doing my best to make some of the hangouts activity-based. As my old friend circles reconvened and new productions were born amidst the chaos of a volatile election season, this chapter in my life took on a palpable vibration. I wasn’t the only one, either. We could all feel that there was something in the air. This year was different.

Kenney Dorcely and Gary Miller flipping the bird inside a Burger King after a night of drinking, circa 2016.

Gary Miller, Midnight the cat, and myself in my Quincy, Massachusetts apartment, circa 2016.

2016 would prove to be a stage of transition. It was an electric period where the future seemed wide open. I lost my day job, I broke up with a girlfriend who had moved in with me, lost my apartment, found a brand new girlfriend in New York, started a publishing company, lost dozens of friends over politicized Facebook posts, and I reunited with some of the best pals I ever had.

By the end of that year, Donald Trump was elected president, Gary moved back to Florida, and I left behind those housing projects for good.

ENTERTAINMENT

In recent years, we’ve become aware of the power of nostalgia as a marketing tool. Movies and television have been using it to wring fandoms dry and embarrass the geriatric actors that once fronted beloved—but now mutilated—IPs. Disney, for example, has very little to their playbook besides, “Make the audience feel like they’re kids again.” It’s an effective strategy. Most ten-years-too-late sequels fail to recapture what made the original properties interesting but bolster enough revenue to justify follow-ups, toys, and television spin-offs. If you hang in there long enough, you may live to see a reimagined, side-sequel solo flick to Superman 3 with a gender-swapped version of Richard Pryor’s Gus Gorman. All possibilities can come to pass if the price is right—or if the corporate leadership is just poorly guided enough.

I do most of my work between midnight and the early hours of the morning. It’s a lonely time. That’s what makes it best for productivity. I often need something to listen to, though, or else my thoughts will win out over my concentration.

Months ago, I wound up in a hole on Archive.org after crashing out on YouTube creepypastas and old Coast 2 Coast with Art Bell episodes. On Archive, there is a trove of VHS rips from the 1970s to 1990s containing entire network blocks of television. Fan of Frasier? Mad About You? Seinfeld? There is a two-hour Must-See-TV block waiting for you, commercials and all. It’s the closest experience you can get to “going back.”

There are video compilations that have been uploaded to YouTube of commercials from all decades. In their comment sections, you will find viewers thinking they’ve double-jumped the system and identified why, for commercials of all things, there is a fondness and an adoration.

The YouTube comment section for a 1990s advert compilation titled “Poorly-Aged 90s Commercials”

Take the example above. SammEater makes a popular note that, “There is something so charmy about old ads that none of these youtube ads can do.” 778 thumbs up.
SemperFine, one month later, says, “It’s called nostalgia.” 29 thumbs up.

SemperFine understands that nostalgia has been weaponized by corporations. He understands that TV commercials are the lowest form of art. But his reply to SammEater’s observation is off base. Nostalgia may have been the bait that lured these viewers to the compilation, but what SammEater said is right. There is something “charmy”, something different about ads from the 20th century that we recognize as worth noting. The average person has trouble articulating it, but there is an intuitive ‘feel’ present within them. That feeling does not mirror any of the popular media of 2024. A series of choices, dated to that time, were made in the preparation of creating these adverts that has given them a distinct emotional texture. The most recurring example of what’s missing from the 20th century ‘house formula’ is irony.

A repulsive modern commercial for Old Spice body wash and deodorant. 

Movies, television series, and ads have been steeped in ironic humor for the last two decades. Commercials of the 21st century will rarely try to persuade their consumer base using sincerity. The irreverent late night TV block Adult Swim has had a stranglehold of influence over how adverts today are scripted and edited. Take a look at any “full body deodorant” commercial and you’ll find a goof troop of characters saying words like “balls” and “asshole.” This will frequently be matched with jump cuts of their faces making unpleasant expressions due to how stinky they are. Compare that with a wholesome Campbell’s Chicken Soup commercial of a snowman entering a log cabin and warming himself up with a hot bowl of soup. Maybe this comparison isn’t 1:1, but there is an element of effort and class present in the old that is not found in the commercials of today. Nostalgia doesn’t always lie to you.

A Campbell’s Chicken Soup commercial from 1993.

Becoming aware of the potency that nostalgia holds hasn’t seemed to make an impact on its allure. On the contrary, it has made it all the more common for people to frequent these media pockets. Is that because we can’t control our impulse to want to “go back” and feel something we felt before? Or, is it possible that the shiny new uniform that the past is wearing is as real as the worst pains we felt as we lived through that time? What’s the old expression — the cream rises to the top?

The cream rises to the top. The past wasn’t as bad as what you’d experienced, and it’s also not quite as cool or charming as it presents itself to be. In a removed sense, you can appreciate those slivers of time for what they were—or what you think they were. Because sometimes the past isn’t actually the past. Sometimes what you’re looking at is a mirage. For nearly a month, I believed I was watching VHS rips of the children’s television block SNICK as I worked on edits of my directorial debut Mass State Lottery. Wrong. Big wrong. What I was watching were niche reconstructions made by an editor. He had used VHS tapes as a source and threw together lineups based on cataloged entries of what aired on Nickelodeon the nights of March 12, 1994, March 19, 1994, March 26, 1994—and so on.

Our memories work the same. We allow these insignificant moments to rebuild in our brains and then we turn them into ice cream sundaes using all the best parts. It doesn’t make a person more base in their instincts to want to tap back into that “better time.” To assume it does is to act willfully ignorant of the concept of “decay.” Decay is very real, I assure you.

The drive towards ‘nostalgia’ and ‘memory lane’, even if their bait may be as dishonest as it is honest, might not be a matter of dodging the gravity of one’s own mortality. Time grants you perspective on things, after all. That desire to “go back” might simply be because, believe it or not, things were better.