from Joe Bielecki: Toward a New Nostalgia

I’m starting to understand time differently. Not as a line, but as a sort of baklava. A layering of experiences over and over each other based on place or sensation, memory or mood. 

I don’t yearn for my childhood, but I do yearn for a time when my worries were smaller, and more than that, I’m chasing a dragon that really has no basis in my experiences of reality. 

We know that witness testimony is flawed. We also know we’re in a post-truth era. Thus, new nostalgia is to have the function of willful and self-aware self-mythologizing. 

I’m back on tumblr. No politics this time. Lots of -core aesthetic tags, whimsigoth, mallgoth, whatevergoth, type tags as well. I love this period of hyper compartmentalization, I agree with the criticisms, but I don’t use it the way the kids do. I don’t need to cultivate an identity in the now, I love who I am. 

Being a husband and a father is so awesome. I mean that in the old sense. Enough awe to not go crazy. Enough to keep me engaged in its mystery - I mean that in a very catholic way. 

New Nostalgia fills in the gaps of my past and helps me contextualize my present, and also plays into how I plan a heading for my future. 

New Nostalgia is a new game plus mode of memory. 

Without having to have had experiences, I can daydream them into being. Feel the species of gut butterflies they would evoke, and carry them with me for as long as I want. 

No, those bespoke memories aren’t real. But the past isn’t real, either. All we have is the right now, but the now is contextualized by what we remember, even if it is an illusion, and it is. 

The fascists get idealized imagined pasts, so I should get to, too. Who I am now is way better than who I wanted to be back then, and the me I am now can dictate who I was then, even if I really wasn’t. 

I love listening to old nerdcore hip hop. Hearing guys rap about the wii or whatever when it was a contemporary device is really magical to me. I love that time capsule. 

I think about Blue Velvet, Negative Space, and The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty a lot. I talk a lot about how scummy teenager stories mean so much to me because I was a few bad choices and slightly different parents away from being like that for real. 

I’ve been living in my daydreams a lot. I’ve been getting really good at it. I can look at a picture of a deck in a misty wood at dusk and feel the water on my face, the slight breeze. Yes, this is partially because I have had a similar experience, but this daydream is yet different. I’m there now even as I type this at my desk at work on my lunch hour that actually ended six minutes ago.

I love Utopian Scholastic, I love vaporwave. I love retrofuturism. I miss displays of Putumayo CDs in every museum gift shop. I go to the museum on my lunch break and look at the taxidermied animals frozen in time from when I was a kid and I feel amazing 

This is what I mean about time being a baklava. It’s all these experiences and imagined experiences layered on top of each other. 

I’m understanding space differently, and spirituality too. I’m understanding what real really means, and allowing myself to live in that pocket, even if I’m afraid that I’m actually wrong. 

New Nostalgia is the mining of the mycelial network of possible pasts to enrich the present, maybe then we can imagine a better future.