It’s great to visit Memory Lane, but it’s fatal to try to live there

By David McElroy · July 20, 2019

I took a shortcut Friday afternoon from my office to my barber shop that took me through an industrial area where I used to spend a lot of time.

I hadn’t been on that part of Oxmoor Road in Homewood for about 15 years. Several of the printing companies I used to deal with — when I was a political consultant — are located in the area, so I was flooded with memories of late-night visits to do press-checks on mail pieces for my clients.

I printed dozens of jobs at Craftsman Printing right over there. Across from them was the old building where PressTech used to be before the owner — a man who did me more favors than I can count — unexpectedly killed himself on the press floor late one night.

My memory was flooded with faces and images and sensations of my time in the area. Part of me enjoyed the sweetly bitter sensation of experiencing a past which is now dead, but another part of me wanted to leave the area and never return. And then I had a sudden thought.

Memory Lane is a one-way street — and it’s a dead end.

I’ve reinvented myself half a dozen times during my career. I never planned such a path, but it has seemed entirely natural to me. I’ve been thinking about this for the last day — and I realize that every time I reinvent myself, I cut ties to who I’ve been and where I’ve been — and I leave that past behind.

Every time I start over, I have to cut my past off. I didn’t quite realize that until now. Most people seem to build a new stage of their lives on the framework of their previous stage, but I do it differently.

I sail a ship to a new place — metaphorically speaking — and then I burn the ship so that I have no way of going back.

As I’ve thought about this today, I’ve tried to think about reconnecting with places and people from my past — and the thought almost makes me shudder. I’m not angry with people from the past. I don’t have anything against the places I’ve been part of. But I’m so focused on where I’m going that memories of the past seem almost like burdens.

I don’t go to high school or college reunions. I’ve mentioned this before. I have no objection to the idea of reunions and I’m not angry with anybody from the past. They just don’t seem relevant to where I’m going.

I don’t spend a lot of time reminiscing with people I’ve worked with in the past. I know a lot of people who do that. Many of them are so full of memories that they spend their careers trying to recreate some fabled time from their youth. But nothing about the past is relevant to what I want to do now.

I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. The core part of me is the same. My values are the same. But I’ve shed a lot of masks and costumes which I used to hide behind. I’ve left behind a lot of things which don’t seem to matter anymore.

It sometimes surprises me to notice what I was reading, listening to and thinking about just 10 years ago. The changes in me have been very gradual, but the end result is that I’m very different from the person I used to be.

I have a lot of respect for my past. I would like to be able to take my future wife to places from my past and show her where I was shaped and what I did in those places. I’d like to take her to the newsroom of a small daily newspaper and say, “This is where I sat when I edited stories every day. This is where we put the pages together. This is where I checked the papers coming off the press.”

I’d like to do that with a number of places. I’d like to take her to the campus of the University of Alabama and show her where I had classes, where I used to station myself to watch people, where specific things that mattered happened to me.

I’d like for her to take me to the places the matter to her. I’d like to visit her hometown and her high school and her college and all the places that helped shape who she is.

Understanding the past — for yourself and your partner — can be very important to understanding how the present came about. But living there will make you stagnant. It will prevent you from moving forward.

I’m in a dynamic period right now when I’m thrashing about in an attempt to reinvent myself again. I don’t know exactly where it will be or who I’ll be with or what I’ll be doing. I have some clues, but I don’t know for sure.

Whatever it is, I know I will leave the dead past behind — where it belongs. My eyes are on the future and another reinvention. That’s where the excitement of life is, not in the past.

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Six years ago this evening, a scared young dog came to live with me. She was so terrified on the ride to my house that she pooped in the back seat of the car. She had originally lived her life on a chain as a puppy. Then she lived among far too many other animals in a cramped apartment, where she was pushed around by bigger dogs. I was told she would always be a “special needs dog” and would probably never be much more than the scared girl she was then. But with a lot of love and patience, a very different dog emerged in the coming months. Now that she’s been with me for six years, it’s hard to imagine her any way other than she is today — as the World’s Happiest Dog®. One day, she’s going to tell her own story on her own podcast. You’ll subscribe when she gets started, won’t you? This loving girl deserves it.

It was obvious to me in the late 1990s that western society is heading toward social and economic collapse. When I told other people back then, most thought I was crazy, because they saw their society as stable and booming. But more and more people have slowly been coming to the same conclusion. And now, even the wealthy and powerful seem concerned. A new report from the World Economic Forum says the erosion of “social cohesion” is what we should fear right now. (Full report here.) Although I disagree with a lot of political spin that these elites put on the dangers ahead, I feel certain that we are headed toward social collapse. And most people will not prepare for it. The book that started me down the road of thinking about this came out in 1993. I thought its reasoning was impeccable, but that the time frame would be longer than the book expected. I still find that book a useful foundation for thinking about the issue — “The Great Reckoning,” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg — even though its predictions are out of date. Dark days are coming. Smart people are going to have a plan to get out of the way of what’s coming. Will you?

Since I posted my audio discussion a couple of nights ago about some recent realizations I’ve had about myself, several people have asked for more about what I quoted from Jordan Peterson. The Canadian psychologist is controversial to some — and I don’t always agree with him — but I’ve found his lectures about art and its relation to psychological archetypes very useful. You can find him here talking about art being more about process than just result, which contains the material I quoted. Here’s another video from a lecture in which he discusses how artists mediate for the rest of society between the known and the unknown. And here’s another portion of a lecture at an art exhibition in which he talks about the necessity of artists for society. And if you missed my audio from two nights ago, here’s a link to my discussion about some things I’ve learned about myself and some things I need to change about myself as a result.

I just realized it was four years ago today when I came uncomfortably close to dying. I don’t remember how blunt I was publicly about this at the time, but the surgeon who operated on me made it clear afterward that I had been much worse than he had thought. My gallbladder was inflamed and I had been in tremendous pain, but what the doctors didn’t know until they started is that the organ was close to rupturing. Surgery that was supposed to take half an hour took two or three hours, because my gallbladder was so diseased — the surgeon’s word — was falling apart as he tried to remove it. I had gone to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital (the same one where I was born) and was kept for emergency surgery the next morning. I should have been home that night, but I had to stay in the hospital three days instead. The weird thing is that I never really believed I could have died. Maybe it was just denial, but I didn’t feel as though it was my time. I thought I still had a lot of life left to live. Four years later, I’m grateful to be alive, but I feel as though my life is still on pause. It’s been a blur. I still feel as though I’m waiting for “the rest of my life” to start.

Is “The Nightmare Before Christmas” really a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie? It’s both, making it a delightful mashup of themes and images from two very different holidays. Although Danny Elfman’s score was nominated for several different awards, Elfman wasn’t a typical composer for film scores. Up until he started working on films with Tim Burton, Elfman had been a rock-and-roll artist best known as the leader of the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the 1980s. Just this week, I heard an interview on the podcast Song Exploder on which Elfman explains how he came to write the music for the movie, including why he approached the music for the film very differently than he had approached writing rock music. I enjoyed the 20-minute interview and if you happen to love the film, this Christmas would be the perfect time to learn more about how the score came to be. Tap or click below to listen. Listen here.

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