I know I’ve written before about that first autumn at Vanderbilt, but I stumbled across my entire “Old Vanderbilt” playlist a couple of days ago and was swept right back in again. One memory clearer than any others: on the morning we left to drive up, I walked out into the back yard with a Mason jar, out to the patch of yard where once lay the sandpile I played in as a preschooler, and scooped a jarful of earth to seal up and take with me. It would be over a decade before I could open it again…
It was a complete new beginning: college kicked to the curb, replaced with the biggest name in the South. (Seriously. I got in at Wisconsin and Emory, two programs whose poli-sci departments beat the hell out of mine, but the name of Vanderbilt is bigger than Harvard to my relatives.) I was a University Graduate Fellow. I had already met most of my new colleagues and one of the other new folks on my official visit, and the department admin had sent me all sorts of helpful information about getting set up in Nashville. By the time I parked in Hillsboro Village, it felt for all the world like I had finally come home.
I say all that to say this: arriving in Nash Vegas, more than anything else, made me understand what it must be like to regenerate. And it felt incredible to turn over my entire wardrobe, claim a completely new school, reset all the car stereo presets and have all the TV on different channels, and most of all – park the car and be able to get places worth going to on foot. And somewhere in the last few years, the memory has gotten a lot more pleasant and a lot less embittering to remember. I guess that’s progress.
The funny thing is that listening to the music I had in September 1994, you can almost feel the difference as against the spring of 1997. 1994 has a lot of songs that sound like the opening credits ought to be playing over them, while almost all the 1997 songs are “grim cliffhanger then fade to black” -type stuff. (Actually, I should work up a full post on songs that sound like the trailer, the opening, the Bond credits, the fade-to-“Executive Producers Ronald D. Moore & Aaron Sorkin” – type stuff…)
But then, “grim cliffhanger then fade to black” is exactly what it was. I remember the spring of 1997 well…basically living in my girlfriend’s Birmingham apartment, commuting to my own place in Nashville for a couple days a week for my one seminar, and spending the rest of the time trying to keep her from going crazy and killing herself and occasionally studying on the side. To this day, though, I cannot tell you why I felt so responsible and stayed with her, because I sure as hell wouldn’t do it now. To make matters worse, she had a single bed, which meant I spent a lot of time asleep on the $20 couch from the thrift store. At least I got most of the days to myself while she was in class, and I tried to study for prelims, but it didn’t go all that well.
In retrospect, it’s a wonder I didn’t stick my head in the oven. My career had already hit the iceberg and I was basically just waiting to see how it sank. My high school friends had long since blown town, my college friends didn’t exist (unless you count her) and even if I’d been closer to my teammates in Nashville, I wasn’t seeing enough of them to make much of a difference in my life. And as for the family…well, for one, they didn’t know I was barely at school anymore, and for another, I don’t think they would react well to the news that I’d taken the greatest opportunity anyone in our family had ever had going back to landing in America and promptly piled it in a big heap and lit it on fire.
So yeah. Alone, adrift, and no future whatsoever. Basically the exact opposite of how I arrived.
The one thing I had going for me was that I had also spent way too much time messing about with my Power Mac 6100. And I was getting good enough at it to solve all my own technical problems (even if I did have a tendency to zap the PRAM and rebuild the desktop every time I rebooted…but what was I supposed to do in the era of 7.5? Stability wasn’t on the cards). Not that Apple’s future was particularly bright, but then, Steve Jobs had just come back, and it was rapidly becoming apparent that we were going to live or die by what he pulled off.
Really, that should be the metric for how far I’ve come. Not from the wistful musings of a adolescent nerd, but from an overly warm spring with a snootful of allergens, thousands of dollars in student credit card debt, no job, no prospects, no pals, no guarantee that I’d have any sort of degree to show for my trouble…in short, in the perfect words of the Sex Pistols, no future.
When set against that, things these days ain’t half bad. There’s a catch, though – measuring my life against the worst moments means that anything short of being shot dead in the alley will make it look like things are better. Obviously, measuring against the heights – fall 1994, summer 1989, the long march of 2003 – things will look worse now. The thing is figuring out where on the continuum I can honestly say I am now. I guess that’s the real trick, isn’t it?