But It's Necessary

Blogging ain’t easy. There are days when nothing of note happens. Today is one of those, as was yesterday. There have been minor blips on the curiosity monitor – an over-the-top e-mailed rant about a particular Oscar winner, a continued demystification of the higher-ups in local government, and a bad-toothed scowl directed my way by a stranger (not my fault). But really, these things are of little interest to a reader or to this writer. Instead, there will be nostalgia.

The persistence of certain memories is a fascinating notion. The other night I watched the short sixties film “La Jetee,” by French filmmaker Chris Marker (if you haven’t seen it and you have the Sundance channel, look for it. It’s on this Friday night). In the film, a particular memory haunts a man. Eyes are cottoned over and time machines are built. By the end of the film – a progression of still photographs, actually – the significance of the memory is revealed. It’s an important memory. But then other seemingly less important memories persist. For example, I know exactly where I was the day after the Minnesota Twins won the 1987 World Series. Specifically, I know where I was at about 7:00PM on that day. I know what I was listening to on the radio. I know the street I was driving on. I know that the stock market had crashed earlier in the day. But I don’t remember where I was the moment the Twins won the World Series, the night before. Nor do I know what I did the morning after (though I think “The Best of Leonard Cohen” was involved). And that street I was driving on at about 7:00PM – Minnetonka Boulevard in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, west of Highway 100 – what was I doing there? I didn’t live or work or go to school near there. Why wasn’t I with my fancypants girlfriend? The reason for me being there hasn’t persisted.

In all likelihood, I was doing what I did a lot of in my early twenties – driving around, listening to radio talk shows or sad folk tapes, wasting time on my drives home, wondering why that girlfriend was slipping away from me just a little, missing my parents who had moved out of the country, leaving me to fend for myself with my funny roommates with their normal names.

Most of my fiction deals with the persistence of memories (real ones, fake ones), the reasons particular memories persist, and, best of all, the layering-on of fictional and often far more interesting details on the real events. So a slightly difficult search of a lakefront home address becomes an odyssey so dangerous and kooky that the movie we saw after finding the house is forgotten and the crisis that never happened is all that matters. Maybe that’s true of many writers. I can name a few who deal in nothing but memory, from which they insert and delete until cows come knocking on the door, having wiped their feet on the doormat, the fools. They’re the writers I tend to read. I trust them.

Which brings us to “The American Astronaut,” now available on DVD. I recommend it highly: http://www.americanastronaut.com/dvdlaunch/