Background

Having been born in December 1954, I turned 60 four months ago. Even as a very small child in late 1950s and early 1960s Southern California, I had the sense of living in a very special time and place. Even then, I would tell myself to try intensely to remember the events of daily life as a way to refer to them later, believing they would eventually become enough a part of the distant past to be of historical interest.

At times it felt a futile endeavor. It seemed odd to think that the Kennedy Administration, the Twist, the Watusi, the British Invasion, the F-105 Thunderchief, cigarette commercials, or Alvin and the Chipmunks might ever be considered anything but thoroughly hip and up to date. Yet, as the young Bob Dylan put it around that time, present now will later be past. Still, it seems a bit disconcerting to watch an episode of "Mad Men," and to think of all the period pieces not as quaint anachronisms but as things that were once very real parts of my life.

One day in August 1965, sitting in the back of the family car as we cruised up the Coast Highway to the beach, I found myself staring out the window and told myself to concentrate as intensely as possible on the moment, as a kind of future reference to the concept that that single time/space particle, which I would later compare to a photon of energy, was absolutely real and present. After that, for many months and even years, it annoyed me a bit that the memory of the moment was merely one of many pieces of recent past. I perceived it intensely, but so what? By the end of the 1960s, that moment in late summer 1965 still wasn't really very long ago. Now at age 60 though, I feel my 10 year old self was trying to think ahead to the person I would be now, to communicate with me across time in a sense.

The child is father to the man, and for most of my life I've had to remind myself, over and over again, that the present and future are supposed to be of greater significance than the past. Yet it is my nature to be reflective, to spend at least as much time thinking about things I've done as about things I plan to do. I've had an interesting life--perhaps an exceptionally interesting life to some people's perceptions--yet so often feel like I'm trying to speak to my 10 year old self, trying to impress the kid with what an interesting and successful adult I've become. I'm forever Googling and YouTubing things I used to see as a child and not really know much about: news stories my folks would fret over, toys I played with, TV commercials I laughed at, breakfast cereals I ate, football games I watched, snippets of song and verse I heard before I could really process language.


Asked to pick one example out of gazillions, here's a vintage 1960s gum commercial that I'd hoped to run across eventually, in my humble opinion just about the coolest ever:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om5GiC4v3LA



Over the years and slowly, all of this reflection has provided virtually a day-by-day chronology of the first twenty years of my life, from news stories to pop music to fashion to general interpretations of the zeitgeist behind any given event. This is not to brag; there are huge gaps in the knowledge, but for myself it's satisfying to have a frame of reference for just about everything that happened around me--and often confused me--as a child.

In starting this blog, I hope to consolidate some of my earlier writings from other online publications that have discontinued their blog functions. Where practicable, I'll provide links to the original blogs, some of which have won awards and some of which are mediocre meanderings by anyone's judgment.

Well, it's getting late but this is a start...