The Time Machine

I own a time machine.  It's small enough to fit in my pocket (although large enough to prompt people to ask me, "Is that a time machine in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?").  The time machine is in the form of a portable hard drive that has tens of thousands of songs on it, many of them have memories attached to them.

Today as I was busy at work wrapping up a project that fell on my lap yesterday afternoon that had a deadline of EOB today, I found myself thrust back to my freshman year of college.

I spent most of my formative early years in the eighties.  I watched all of my siblings get married in that decade, not to mention many of my nieces and nephews were also born in that decade.  Heck, I'm closer in age to most of them than I am to my own siblings.

I never bought into the whole grunge thing.  I mean I appreciated that that kind of music and its lyrics appealed and spoke to many of my peers but it fell rather flat with me.  For a little over half of the nineties, I was in denial that the eighties were over.  My freshman year of college I had reached such a state of denial that I was referring to the year as nineteen-eighty-sixteen (the denial came on much stronger my second semester than it had been my first semester).

I was a college radio DJ and much of the music I played had been popular in the eighties or it was more recent music of bands who had been far more popular in the eighties than they were in the nineties.

So today when Johnny Hates Jazz's Shattered Dreams started playing it was nineteen-eighty-sixteen all over again.  I could see myself dressing in 80s fashion, still listening to the music of that era, and yearning for reruns of Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Growing Pains, ALF, Amazing Stories, Cheers, and even some of the lesser known shows of that era: The Greatest American Hero and Voyagers (the latter of which was my favorite show when I was in first grade...  no wonder years later I ended up getting my BA in History).

Today's journey to the past kind of felt like a nested journey, I was taken back to an era when I felt a strong sense of nostalgia for an earlier era.  That being said I also felt a twinge of nostalgia for my brief spell in the late seventies, being a toddler watching Deney Terio on Dance Fever (I only have a few memories of my toddlerhood- being a fan of Dance Fever is one of them, and making my sister, Laurie, play her 8-track of Billy Joel's The Stranger whenever I wandered into her bedroom are probably the most vivid).

I don't know where this time machine will take me next, no matter "when" it takes me, it tends to leave a smile on my face.