Bare Naked Larry

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

You Can't Go Home Again

Well, you can physically, but it turns out home is a place in time as well as space and barring the invention of a time machine you just aren’t going back to what you remember anytime soon. I visited my hometown this last weekend after having not being back for two years, this trip due to the visitation of an Aunt and Uncle from Vermont with a mutual relative, who is my grandmother’s nephew (I’m not sure what relationship that exactly makes between us). It was great to see everyone and I had a pleasant stay, but while home I discovered that the roller-rink I had worked at for over 10 years had closed it’s doors. Not that this should have come as any great shock -- during my previous visit I had been appalled at how run down the establishment was beginning to look as well as the general area of Milan Illinois where it is located.

It is hard not to look at the increasing entropy that was Skate Ranch and not make some Dorian Gray connection with my own advancing years. For years now I have been told by most I look at least ten years younger than my chronological age (a flattery I have chosen to believe). Does the end of Skate Ranch signal the beginning of my own mortal decline? While it would have been impractical to try to recapture my youth as a roller-rink D.J., at least theoretically it would have been an option.

While it's always nice to see new and nicer things come along, we are still sad and reluctant to the see the old touch stones of our youth pass away. Every old storefront that closes down, every celebrity that passes away, every song that now gets played on the oldies dial, all further reminders that our youth is getting more and more distant. I think in some superstitious way we feel that if the things around us do not change then our own mortality can be held at bay. Perhaps we also feel some vital essence of our own permeates these institutions and if they do not linger past our deaths then some part of us also fades away.

I think the only way to hold these morose thoughts at bay is to embrace the change, live for the future, enjoy the new. I have been stagnant for much too long in many areas of my life, probably thinking wistfully back too often to my halcyon days when disco was king (yes I said disco, you got a problem with that?)

For those of you that have read BNL before, you are probably aware that I am getting married soon. I do have the mildest of regrets at not being able to share with my bride the giddy days of abandonment that just enjoying life is of your late teens and early twenties (I having especially enjoying those years in the hedonistic '70s). Still we are both far from dead (her quite a bit less so than me). And while we won’t be gyrating to "Disco Inferno" by the Trammps on the dance floor or skate floor together anytime soon, we do plan on seeing a great deal of this world together in a new bid to grab life by the lapels and give it a good shake. [BTW as a historical note of sorts, Skate Ranch had both a skate floor and a dance floor, the latter being an impressive under-lit variety ala Saturday Night Fever]

I guess in closing all I can say is that while the past is a nice place to visit it is most certainly not a good place to live.