The Art Of Misremembering

I hate clichés.

Granted, not as much as I hate war, racism or gun violence. Those tragic trinkets of humankind’s diary are far worse propositions than a betrayal of original thought ever could be. I could never hate clichés as much as I hate the undeserving slice of American niche that Applebee’s broadens its britches on. And the only reason I don’t hate the unimaginable popularity of Jim Belushi more is because that magical marquee of a last name keeps his vastly more talented older brother in the building.

Still, clichés crook my nook. They nada my colada. Clichés are the better ideas gone stillborn. And they are everywhere; from our favorite team’s aversion to success to some wealthy ass-hat’s predictable relationships to sayings that really should have been left unsaid.

Those were simpler times

You don’t hear this one a lot more today, you simply hear it as often as you probably heard it say, twenty years ago. Or forty, depending on your age. Your parents heard it a shit ton themselves. And believe it or not, your grandparents . . yeah, they heard it plenty.

I’m fairly certain I’ve uttered these words before and I’m even more certain that I hate myself for having done so. Because it’s candy coated pretense that’s being served up in artificially flavored past tense by someone yapping in the present tense and that is way too much tense for the empty calories it’s supplying. To put it nicely, whenever someone bemoans our present circumstances by waxing poetically about our past, they are being insincere. To put it less nicely, they’re lying their ass off. The only thing worse than the bemoaners are the piners. Because while the former group is merely being expressively unsophisticated, the piners are just being whiny. Or winey. And sometimes . . . both.

Listen, we sure as shit are up against it these days. Everything is way more expensive and way less dependable. Cities are under siege, most of our leaders have eloped with Becky Sharp and the Doomsday Clock now sits a scantily clad ninety-seconds away from Boom, sans the Shaka Laka.

The fine print on our day to day business ain’t beautiful, but that doesn’t mean the rearview was all sushi and Rembrandt. Take for instance, the middle ages where almost a quarter of the population was broke. Back then, most people celebrated their thirtieth birthday by being dead. In the 1800’s, people buried half their clan on cross-country road trips and it was considered a success! The early 20th century was a brave new world unless you were a toddler, since the child mortality rate sat at a robust thirty percent. If you were lucky enough to make it to your tenth birthday, you celebrated by going to work in a factory and if that didn’t kill you either, welp . . scoring a fake ID on your 14th birthday so’s you could join the Great War? Probably did. If you made it through that shit storm of an existence, you had the Great Depression to look forward to.

The point is, things were never simple. Hell, most of the peeps who write love letters to the past probably didn’t even live through it, and if they were alive, they’ve probably forgotten all the terrible shit they went through. And do you know why they forgot it? Because they were busy thinking about how much simpler the future was going to be. A little too ironic . . .

Don’t cha think?

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