by Dane Roberts
Daily Lobo columnist
If you live in the University neighborhood south of Central Avenue and are walking home down an alley littered with beer cans, and you happen to see a few cornstalks peeking over a fence trellised with a vine of ripe green beans, you will have found the house of someone with a soft spot for the past. Someone trying humbly to bring a small part of farm life into the student ghetto. You will have found my house.
You see, for as a long as I can remember, I've suffered from nostalgia. It's not just that I love garden-fresh vegetables. It's also that I've always dreamed of life as it once was, when most of what you consumed was the fruit of your labor in a meaningful, direct way.
There's something beautiful about a life spent in pastures instead of parking lots. I could rhapsodize about the beauty of hand-crafted things and the ugliness of plastic, but before I begin a bucolic rant, I should say that I know nostalgia is a problem, and I'm working on some therapies to treat it.
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First, and most obviously, it's simply naive. There are good reasons we haven't clung so tightly to outmoded ways of life, for they were attended with hardship and suffering. My grandparents moved off the farm the first chance they got, and I don't think they ever had second thoughts.
So the first and most important part of my regimen of self-treatment for nostalgia is to constantly remind myself of the benefits of progress.
For example, when I find myself thinking of buying a dairy heifer - and I'm only partly joking here - for fresh whole milk, I should remind myself, "Dane, milking a cow twice a day is burdensome. Besides, it requires attentive sanitation or it can be dangerous."
The second problem with nostalgia is that it's always too late. Once you've felt nostalgia for something, it's because you've lost whatever it is you're waxing nostalgic about. In fact, chances are good the object of your yearning is something you took for granted.
Maybe you're feeling nostalgic for the days when kids could play outside without adult supervision and fears of abduction. Do you think anyone back in those days even stopped for a moment to imagine a day when parents wouldn't let their kids roam the neighborhood freely?
It is the solution to this problem that I am most proud of: In response to the difficult anachronistic quality of nostalgia, I now use "nowstalgia" - that is, nostalgia for the present, for the here and now. Instead of bemoaning what you've lost, why not demonstrate a special appreciation now for what, with a little imagination, you will realize might be gone tomorrow? Think of some awful scenario for the future, then start feeling nostalgia for the things that scenario would take away, but that you still have the luxury of enjoying.
For example, I'm feeling nowstalgic about the road trip. It's not hard to imagine a future energy crisis - with terrorists blowing up oil refineries or something - in which gasoline is so scarce and expensive that the government is forced to ration it on a per-capita basis. That would effectively make the road trip as quaint as Old Route 66. Well, I'm not going to wait until then to feel a special fondness for it. I'm going to make an effort to take a long-distance drive and feel nostalgic about it the whole way.
Once you get the hang of it, it's easy. Why not feel nowstalgia for being able to see the stars at night? How about being able to make a purchase with just cash, without having to swipe a national ID card that records every transaction for taxation and security purposes? How about lectures from live professors, not teleconferences with cheaper, Third World academics?
With this regimen of self-treatment, I'm already pulling myself out of an unhealthy regard for the past.
The good ol' days are now - all it takes is a little gratitude and a healthy dose of paranoia and pessimism.
