You can't go home again...



Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.”

And if you don’t know who that is, go read a book.  Actually read a lot of books.  Wolfe, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Heinlein, Burroughs, Twain and O. Henry… and those are just SOME of the Americans.  Don’t forget to read Dickens, Doyle, Wells, Dumas, Sartre, oh hell I could keep going for a year…  I swear, the ignorance today that passes for ‘sophisticated’… 

Never mind…

Where was I?

Oh, yeah… Wolfe… going home….you can’t get there from here…but it’s the old same place…..oh, the same old place, it’s out back, I’ll get the key…

Sounds like a job for Nick Danger, Third Eye.

What?  You people don’t know THAT one either? 

*sigh*

Barbarians.

Old Wolfie wasn’t talking about going to your parent’s house, even if it is still the same one you grew up in. 

No, he’s talking about revisiting a part of your life that’s passed into history.  You can try, but no matter how hard you do, it’s doomed. 

The old girlfriend/boyfriend?  Yeah, boy howdy… that one’s getting a hell of a workout these days with the help of the internet. 

And what happens? 

99 times out of a 100 the guy/gal comes slinking back, tail between their legs, or worse, you run into them looking like they’ve been dragged through the pits of hell a year or two later, and they start telling you what a mistake they made. 

Yeah, tell you what, become a Catholic and tell a priest, because I don’t fucking care. 

Sure, I can sit here and wish I was back, 30 years ago having fun in college.  As much hell as I went through back then, I did have fun, perhaps the best time of my life, overall.  I actually made friends, a few of which I still have.  The kind of friends who will be there when you get planted, to pour a dram of whiskey on the grave and shed a real tear or two.  Mind you, I sure as hell wish I had the knowledge I do NOW, about what I am, back THEN.  Things would have been very different. 

Better?

Worse?

I don’t know, but I know they’d have been different. 

Even so, those were my days of wine, women and song…

Not buying that one, huh?

Okay, who am I kidding.

It was sex, drugs and rock and roll, baby!!  Yeah, baby, yeah!! 

And if I ran into the same people again, here, 30 years later… at first, there’d be some laughs and “do you remember when we… “ or, “do you remember the snack bar crew giving old man Whassisname that mouse sandwich?  With the tail hanging down?” and “who knew a donkey could crap that much in a dorm hallway…” and even, “do you remember when she.. and that guy.. in the parking lot at Grinder’s… and the way the car was bouncing on it’s springs, and the way her head would pop up every now and then to look around but she wasn’t wearing her glasses and she couldn’t see us out in the parking lot laughing our asses off?” 

No, I’m not going to tell you if any of those were made up….

There’d be drinks, and laughs and some tears and probably even some sex, drugs and rock and roll….  But at the end of the day, the laughs would trail off, there’d be more and more uncomfortable silences and then people would drift back to the their lives the way they are NOW. 

The past is “passed” for a reason.

You can’t go back.

You’re a very different person today than the one you were 30 years ago… (in my case, that’s a damned good thing…).  Everyone changes, whether they actually grow and mature, or just grow older… you are different today than you were yesterday, and so on and so on and so on….

You can’t go home again, people.  That’s the wrong direction.  Go forward.  It may be something familiar.  It may be something new. 

Try it. 

Semper Fi
Master Aspie Dave

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

  I don’t want a funeral. Why are so many autistics introverts, or hate crowds? Because we’re quick learners.   Most of us, unless we live a very sheltered life, are expected to interact and play with other kids from a very young age.   After age two, or so, this takes an ever darker turn for many of us.   We still want to have friends. We still feel the need to be liked.   We still want acceptance.   Instead, what we find from the other kids is violence and being ostracized.   Being around each other is where children learn the unspoken language, body posture, non-verbal clues, status, and for want of a better term, where you are in the pecking order.   Autistic kids (at least speaking from my personal experience and the experience of my sons), not only don’t learn this automatically, we usually have no idea it’s going on at all.   So we speak out of turn, we violated the status of the high ranking kids on the playground.   The reac...
Read more

Of Cabbages and Kings

  I am mourning for a woman I never met. And yet I felt a connection to her, and I don't think I'm alone in that.  We were distantly related, some would say so distantly that it is irrelevant, but it made a difference to me.  Elizabeth Regina, Second of Her Name...  and yes some of my ancestry traces back to the Plantagenets so I was serious about being "family" in a sense.  An intelligent woman.  A woman of class and probity.  A woman who held great power but was delicate in the use of power.  A woman with a lively sense of humor and an abiding love for animals.  A brave woman who served in wartime, driving ambulances.  A woman with an incredibly difficult job and an increasingly disrupted family who nevertheless managed to handle the situation with class.  Yes, we all know those things, and we all know who she was and what she did, but why does her passing leave us feeling a bit empty? Perhaps it's because she has always just BEEN...
Read more