I wish I could take you back to the 80s for a visit but I can’t. I mean, I do it several times a day sometimes, figuratively speaking, but that’s me. You just had to be there and if you weren’t it’s hard to explain. It was different.

It feels like another lifetime. It feels like another person, and in many ways, it was. The 2019 me ate the 1985 me whole and he’s in there somewhere deep. He shouts and it echoes and echoes. We are a lot alike, he and I, so it strikes a chord every time.

We both like this song. We both feel it the same way. We have that in common. It’s like that sometimes with songs though and with people who learned to feel and express feelings through music. It’s a common language. We got that part down.

It was a sloppy time really, but the concrete hadn’t quite hardened on anything yet when we were all in the post-Viet Nam reset. These days I wish we could go back and tear it all the fuck up and start over from about 1981, but that’s not the way shit works. We just have to make the best of things as they are. So yah, there’s this sloppy 20-something living somewhere down inside a somewhat less sloppy 50- something. I could be his dad but I’m not. He’s kind of mine. We talk sometimes, mostly in this song-code way.

It’s unsettling sometimes how much alike we are, but then sometimes it’s comforting. He’s one of the few people I have more than a platonic relationship with.

It makes me think of that line from The Great Gatsby, and his platonic conception of himself. There was a long period of time when it seemed I would never be more than the son of 1985; that I had sprung from his platonic conception of himself. It’s funny also that it was because of Gatsby that I even had a clue that it could happen that way, and that it was… But the context there is important, so the quote:

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

I did escape that fate.

But I’m still unsatisfied, and that’s a fact.

2019 MacGregor pretty much knows a lot of things that 1985 did not. He may not be any closer to any real satisfaction but he fairly well knows what will not simply not work. He wandered around this morning thinking about maybe spending money on something that might… just might… fill the hole for a bit. He realized though upon wandering in and out of shops that it was a fool’s errand. He walked home seven miles with nothing, or no purchases anyway. He walked home seven miles with the satisfaction, if temporary, that he could assess the situation and make an educated decision not to repeat something that never worked anyway. He walked home seven miles and took a nap. That satisfied something else.

Seven miles of baby steps.

Still unsatisfied, but… progress.