day45 - the healing properties of nostalgia
dear luci,
tonight, i am singing to some music while my bird, quinn, chirps along. i have not been an exceptionally good bird-mother in the last two days, so i am anxious to make it up to her. this, while very cute, is also an impediment to my writing speed, but i can live with that. so far, she seems to enjoy clairo, sir chloe, beabadoobee, etc. i can't tell if it's the music she likes, or my singing, or both or neither tbh. she's a free spirit.
today, amidst some lovely moments with lovely people, i started thinking about the video store i used to visit in my hometown. why? shirts. i have a video ezy shirt. not like, an old employee shirt, but like, the logo printed on a t-shirt. much less cool. so how might i go about getting one of these employee shirts? well, i could ask the old owner of the place? he's not on facebook. damn. mum suggested i posted something on my hometown's buy swap sell page, which is quite ingenius. so i did.
here's the post's text, with identifying information redacted:
"The title pretty much says it all: I'm looking for an old Video Ezy Employee Shirt, button up or polo, I don't mind. Sizes Small to Extra large are all acceptable. I won't pay any price, but if you have one and you make an offer, I'll consider it.
Now, if you want the extended story, here you go. Like many Millennial/Gen-Z cuspers, my youth was spent fawning over colourful DVD and VHS cases amidst rows of shelves in the [redacted]Video Ezy on [streetname]. As a kid, there was nothing more magical to me— so much so that at age 6, when people asked what I wanted to be, I told them "A movie director". In the interim though, I genuinely wanted to work part time at Video Ezy, but by the time I was old enough to do that, business was not so good, and hiring was presumably not a regular process. Funnily enough, I followed through on my dreams and studied film at [University], where I wrote, shot, and acted in a fair few short films. As I reflect on the (relatively brief) time I've spent on this earth, I realise that something... is missing. I can no longer pray at the altar of the rental gods- they replaced it with a [different business]. I attribute a great deal of emotional and spiritual malaise to the fact that Video Ezy's presence in my life has been reduced to a barely audible whisper. This is what brings me here. I would like a keepsake, some kind of thing to hold onto... perhaps an employee shirt? It might not fill the hole in my heart, but it would help. Make no mistake— I am not looking for this shirt to appease some ironic desire to accumulate hipster kitsch, but because I look back at that store with incredible fondness.
Thank you for your time.
And if you can post it to [city] (the cost of which I would gladly cover) I would be incredibly grateful. If not, that's cool, I can send a proxy to pick it up for me."
That's all entirely true, by the way. I left one story out- for one birthday, i got my first digital camera. all i wanted to do that night was go to video ezy. i brought my new gift to my favourite place in the world and took my first photo: a noisy, likely unfocused, underexposed image of the orange neon sign atop that building.
i don't have that photo. but i can imagine it. how much would this place have meant to little ~8 year old me that i wanted to capture an image of it forever? i was a weirdly pop-culture obsessed child. my first autistic (presumably) obsessions were over kitschy ad campaigns i saw on tv. i recgonise that does sound uniquely dystopian but it resulted in an adult with healthy scepticism and good media literacy, so it all kinda worked out?
anyway, let me get to the point. i expected reactions in the comments to be cynical at best-- that it would go mostly unnoticed, dismissed as just another weird post from someone with too much time on their hands (it totally is, by the way). but actually, it was completely the opposite. people were tagging their friends who they knew worked there, asking if they had any lying around. like, a fair few people. that was really fucking inspiring to me. that the community i grew up in saw my silly little post and found it endearing, funny, etc. that they didn't just wave it off. it is almost undoubtedly not that deep but fuck it, i think its signifcant, so it is. in any case, it made me smile.
so in a very roundabout way, that's how i feel about nostalgia. it can be an easy escape into a rose-coloured past, but it can also be a strong uniting feeling, something that inspires a profound earnestness in even the most cynical old bastards. and i dig sincerity. need more of that around.
sweet dreams luci <3