> be me
> go home because parents guilted me into it
> first step out the airport. It’s 1000000° and the air is sticky asf
> IveMadeAHugeMistake.jpg
> house is a wreck. random bullshit piled to the ceiling in spare rooms just like when I was a kid
> mom bitching about brown people. same bitching I’ve heard all my life
> dad talking about how he’s gonna retire soon. yeah right. what would he do with his time if he wasnt working?
> feel melancholy and hopelessness setting in
> tfw you realize you have to live like this for 2 more days until your flightYou can never really go home.
Fuck.
It’s partly why I never felt prey to the nostalgia trends that afflict my generation (x). You can’t go back so why not focus on now? I love getting older. I am aware of my parents and my impending mortality but I embrace it.
I miss the house I grew up in. I still have those moments of core memories that come off of a sound, or smell, or touch, but I’m here. The moments are sweeter for knowing I can’t return.
The trick is to know that home is in you so it doesn’t matter where you are.
The whole point of Falling Down
The Michael Douglas movie where he holds McDonald’s workers at gunpoint until they make him a breakfast sandwich five minutes after they stopped serving breakfast?
Yes.
I just want what’s in the picture is that just too much to ask?
Oh, sorry. In the beginning of the movie, and parts throughout, Michale Douglas’s character keeps repeating the phrase “I’m going home!” Even though he really has no home to go to. Basically trying to go to his ex-wife that she does not want him around because he is scary. He also lost his job as well.
Pretty much “going home” means he wants to go back into the past, A simpler time where prices of food was cheaper and there are not so many new age shops taking away his ice cream shops.
But also he has somewhat of a heart, truly wanting to see his daughter, and being highly sympathetic with this one black guy who got laid off (or could not get a bank loan, i dont remember) holding a sign saying “Not Economically Viable”, while the protester gets arrested.
In short, it is about fascism, escalation, and the problems of moden society in the 90’s, while also having a stragely compassionate lense as well.
I’m aware I was just thinking of the McDonald’s scene. The whole movie as you said is an allegory for wanting to “go home to a simpler time”. It is unfortunately tied to fascism now but the sentiment is felt by many normal people. It’s completely human nature to want to go home and home is as much a place as it is a point in time or a feeling
I’ve kind of been on both sides of this.
For me, returning to and then leaving my home town triggers feelings of melancholy but also relief. I didn’t grow up in a stable, solidly middle-class (or higher) lifestyle, so I’m sure that’s a factor.
While I had a good childhood and loving parents, things got complicated the older I became. And even when I happen upon a reminder of the good times or a fond memory, way too often it’s tainted by how fucked up things were at the time.
On the other hand, “the kids” … it’s wonderful when they’re home for summer. When they’re at my house, at least I know they are safe, happy, and that all their needs are being met, in as much as possible. It’s sad to see them go, when I know it’s going to be months before they’re back.
But also, it’s a sigh of relief when my life can go back to being on my terms sans drama and chaos. It’s almost total bliss when I can go out to the kitchen in my undies for a cup of coffee fully confident that the milk jug won’t be sitting in the fridge completely empty (or with a minuscule amount of milk remaining so as to be practically useless but also technically not empty).
After both parents died, we four kids sold the house. It’s still “home”, but it’s not ours anymore. That home exists only in our memories, as do our parents. At 60, I’m the youngest of the four of us, so they’ll all be dying sooner than later. I take better care of myself than any of them, so I’ll probably be the last to go. Then it will only be my son left. He’s adamant that he doesn’t want kids, and I fully understand. Our family name will die with him.
That’s life.
And so it goes
Expected this to take a dark turn because anon, was not prepared for warm poetic nostalgia in its place.
I’m still young at 25, but I can see the hallmarks of aging. I’ve moved to a new state for 5 years now and when I visited my old home it felt half foreign, half familiar. I’m the youngest so my mom’s age is starting to show.
Things I consider recent are now described as “years ago”. I’m seeing things evolve through life. Things that felt like they had a beginning, middle, end now are starting up again. Almost like a ride that’s resetting for the next ones in line.
The biggest sign of aging for me is when you make a reference to a TV show and the person you share it with goes, “ah that was before my time.” Then, you realize it wasn’t released a few years ago… But more like a decade or two ago.
The biggest hit was someone who asked me about 9/11 because they weren’t alive at the time.
The other day I was talking in a common interest discord and mentioned that I largely moved from console to PC games in the late 90s. To which I was met with a “jfc how old are you?”
What sticks out to me, in hindsight, is how much of the development that happened in my early childhood. I remember the large empty track of land next to the highway that was turned into the local mega-mall. I remember the highway itself transforming from a simple flat two-lanes-each-way stretch all the way into downtown. Now its a six-lane overpass that’s getting another expansion. I remember the old community swimming pool that’s been expanded into a sprawling Aquatic Center. And how the half dozen different church denominations have been consolidated into one big Catholic compound. We have this enormous City Center that was just an abandoned parking lot when my parents moved in.
I also remember how the neighborhood had been comically, painfully white. Way back in the 90s, the town was effectively built on White Flight from the inner city, so it was mostly business and engineer families who’d abandoned downtown. We had a few big immigrant communities, primarily East Asian in character. But Latinos and Black families were kept beyond the county line by a combination of notoriously racist policing and white nationalist affiliated developers and real estate agencies. But all of that lapsed over the subsequent decades - now we have a much more mixed and more minority-affluent population. Hell, we have an East Asian County Judge, which is something that the elderly white now-minority had been fighting tooth and nail for decades.
I have no idea whether I’d say the area is better or worse. Racism hasn’t really gone away, it’s just much more of an Iranian Expats hating on Indian Expats thing that I’m not involved in. The fact that there’s still a ton of money being pumped through the city doesn’t hurt. But we still have a lot of greed and corruption and clichishness. There’s definitely a noticeable divide between the older and newer parts of the town. And we even have some apartments now, instead of just single-family homes as far as the eye can see.
Time moves on, I guess.
Kind of reminds me of this beautiful poem:
"…And I will leave. but the birds will stay, singing:
and my garden will stay, with its green tree,
and its white water well…
Many afternoons the skies will be calm and blue,
and the bells in the belfry will chime,
like they’re chiming this very afternoon.
The people who have loved me will die,
and the town will burst anew every year.
And in the corner of my green, flowering whitewashed garden,
my spirit will wander nostalgic from tree to well.
And I will leave,
and I’ll be lonely, without a home,
without a green tree, without a white water well,
without calm and blue skies…
And the birds will stay, singing."
-“El viaje definitivo”, Juan Ramón Jiménez
There’s a pretty good chance the house I grew up in will be bulldozed to build a condo complex. The 100+ year-old oak tree might survive, but more than likely it’ll be cut down, as will the maples and the plum tree.
The birds will move on.
Yeah, I noticed in my late 20s that the world has changed from my childhood. All my childhood sports heroes have retired. New music genres have replaced what I heard on the radio. A lot of my old haunts are still there, but some have been knocked down and replaced. It’s an… unsettling feeling when you realize the ground is moving beneath your feet. The best thing you can do is to keep moving yourself (figuratively, not literally). Explore new places, make new hobbies. Fill up your time with new experiences and you won’t have as much of a sense of loss.
But all the new stuff is enshittified by capitalism so it’s not as enjoyable as the old stuff.
Nah, it’s always been shitty, the internet just let us know about it. It’s more like, we had a brief window of lot of information and people having hope.
No, products and services are actually way worse these days. More expensive and riddled with micro-transactions trying to nickle and dime you every way they can.
The best is when you are lying in bed at night and some odd mix of neurotransmitters unlocks a memory you haven’t thought of in years, and then you spend an hour crying about the gulf of time between then and now, for what/who you’ve lost, and managing the crushing guilt that follows when you feel awful about not tending to the garden of your memories better.
Aging brings along the realization of how many things only exist in your memory, and even if they are recorded or memorialized no one will ever experience them the way you did.
That restaurant with your parents, That Mall, staying with distant family in some house that was sold 30 years ago or outright bulldozed. Those places are only special to you, and when you cease to exist, they won’t be special in the same exact way to anyone else. It’s the stupid childhood memories that honestly don’t mean anything on their own that feel the worst IMO
Almost 40 here, I feel the same. Some things evolve, some things get replaced and some mostly stay the same, but the worst is when it feels stagnant or even decaying. That’s worse than actual loss in some ways.
Fake: Anon has an idyllic homelife
Gay: Anon is emotionally well-adjusted
Fellas, is it gay to be emotionally well-adjusted?
The adjustment knob is on your prostate
I don’t have to be gay to do that. Just get a buttplug and watch titties on the screen.
In the words of NK Jemisen:
“Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.”
It definitely happens. Not sure where the turning point is but I’m in my 30s and both my folks are in their 70s; somewhere along the way our interactions shifted slightly where I lean on them less and they lean on me more.
This reminds me so much of John Greens writing, check him out if you like some melancholic writing.
The last couple of times visiting my grand parents house around the time they were in a nursing home and after they passed away was surreal. The house was rotting as they did. Everything is like I remember, but there’s some mold in things, rotten wooden stairs that broke when I walked in them. The thing that just really upset me was after they passed my uncle moved in and smoked inside so everything smelled like smoke. It was disgusting. I don’t know how he could choose to ruin his childhood home like that. Maybe he’s totally noseblind to it. The shitty thing was that it also technically wasn’t his house at the time. They’ve all sorted it out now but he just sort of moved in without really getting permission from his siblings.
The most pernicious self-deception is that things are as they appear to be. The second is that they should be.
This sounds pithy and interesting but I’m not quite sure I can decipher it.
I got no place to go back too. I don’t have anyone waiting for me anywhere.
If it’s any consolation, I just returned home because of a death in the family. And while things are nostalgic, they’re also completely different, and I know that the time and experiences I had when I was a child will never be the same again.
I can go back to the place, but I can never go back to the time. Things have changed. I’m on a new adventure, in a different chapter of my life story. Many of my friends are gone. Their stories have ended. Mine continues.
Also, some things haven’t changed, but should have.
Yeah, the kitchen smells the same, mom’s laugh is the same, dad’s still using the same chipped mug.
But, dad’s prejudices haven’t changed, they’ve only calcified a bit more. Mom’s learned helplessness has only gotten worse. The old disagreements never got resolved, they just got shelved, ready to be taken down again when the time comes.
Plus, the parents think that you, their kid, hasn’t changed. They still see you as helpless and in need of their guidance, even when they’re having increasing difficulty navigating the world because things are changing too quickly for them to handle. Hence the old meme of “take your resume, walk right into that office, and demand a job!”
I get the appeal of nostalgia, and it’s sometimes fun to pretend that things haven’t changed, but it’s better to realize that time keeps marching forward and try to adapt to the new situation.
Beautifully put.
I love my home town. It’s lovely, quaint, and consistently ranks somewhere on the “best places to live in” surveys. I was really fortunate to grow up there, even if I didn’t realise it at the time.
I flew the nest, found my own path, and moved around a bit. I’ve settled six hundred miles away - and with the numbers of folk in my family slowly starting to dwindle, I’m finding fewer and fewer reasons to go back home.
I miss my formative years, but rather than grieve for them, I’m thankful for growing up somewhere that gave me a lot of joy and good memories. I may not have grown up where I am now, but it’s where my other half and my kids are, and that’s home now.
