preemptive nostalgia

It's 1987 in my apartment. I'm listening to REM's Document from a tape I recorded on my dad's stereo when I was fifteen. It was recorded from an actual vinyl album – if you listen closely in between the songs, you can hear the scratch of the needle.

Ever since I jacked my tape player into my computer to digitize the Fray Day 5 audio, I've been playing all my old tapes in the office. It's trippy to hear old music this way – ancient Memorex tapes that come with high school memories of pudgy walkmans with fuzzy headphones and driving around in an old vw bug with my sister's radio shack tape player wedged into the dashboard – drifting out of newfangled computer speakers that are more accustomed to ambient electronica MP3s, furtively downloaded and stored on temporary media.

Someday we'll find that the sad thing about our brave new digital world is its lack of artifacts. There will be no physical leftovers. No milk crates of dusty old tapes, no boxes of emotional leftovers to discover. In my childhood desk in my mom's house is every note I ever received in high school, elegantly folded and perfectly preserved. Someday, when I look back at my late twenties, there will be no boxes, no dust, no objects. Just ones and zeroes that have long since stopped working.

And, somehow, that makes me nostalgic in advance.

{ 3:37pm }