You can't go back but you can go again
This one is about a bunch of books I found when I was a teen but also how things change and you do too.
(Hey, this one is kind of long, so you can use that link just under the header to read on the web, if that's easier.)
When I was in my second-to-last year of high school, I was wandering the tiny downtown with some friends after a half-day of school. It was fair season, so we'd been let out early (me right after "keyboarding" which was what they called typing, done on those big amber CRTs). I lived out pretty far and only got around by bike, so I never spent time in the town part of town and it was as foreign to me as The Town With The Mall, or the City With The Big Mall.
It was a lovely early summer day and we wandered past a bookstore I had no idea existed. Nobody was interested in going inside, which was fine, there was big box of books outside with the always-tempting "FREE" markered on it. I spent the rest of the afternoon carrying that box around, wrassling it into a car and taking it home. It was full of somebody's collection of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, from about 1978 to 1993, plus or minus a few issues (some collected quarterlies were in there too).
Image description: A wide but shallow box, filled from edge to edge with the slim and time-battered spines of Asimov issues. The typefaces and styling of the spines reflects the aesthetics changes between the late '70s and early '90s. End ID.
Basically those issues became my personality that summer. I read them all front to back and kept index cards in each of my favourite stories--like an early form of Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Mars that I ended up going back to re-read after encountering the actual trilogy a decade later. That core sample of time was an interesting era for sci-fi short stories and a gorgeous time for interior artwork. I scanned some of my favourites in 2011, here's Green Mars' photorealistic illustration by J.K. Potter, or the striking mid-story illustrations by Janet Aulisio of With Thimbles, With Forks And Hope by Kate Wilhelm, and starting from this one and paging through you can read a little about how TTRPGs were talked about at the time.
I don't re-read these issues very often any more, partly because I've read them so many times. My favourite issues came with me when I moved from home. When I was reunited with the rest a decade later, those two linear feet of science fiction short stories became a cornerstone of my library. They're nice to grab when going on a trip, you'll always find something to read in them, and some of the stories will pop into memory like any story does.
One of those stories I think about a lot is R.A. Lafferty's 'You Can't Go Back' (see the opening illustration here), from the September 28, 1981 issue. The basic arc of it is that when the narrator and his friends were kids they spent some time on a small moon that floated around in a desert canyon. As adults, they go back to prove to themselves what the place was and wasn't, and find that either their memories or the place have soured (literally, in some ways).
Yet Another Lafferty Blog has some good thoughts on it, here's a quote with a quote from the book, for some nesting thoughts:
What seemed magical and magnificent to the kids now seems dingy and insignificant when encountered in adulthood. One of the old men comments on how much smaller the moon looks as they fly to it in the helicopter:
"But it is as big as it used to be. It's still about a hundred yards in diameter," "Yes, but the yards aren't as long as they used to be," Whelk complained.
This quote is key--the yards in the kids measurement seemed much larger than the yards of an old man's evaluation. The grandeur has diminished as they face it with adult eyes.
For all that I am the Batman to my best friend's Superman--I tend to the existential and dark like a deep sea creature--I think also my favourite thing in life is to exercise my sense of wonder. Sometimes it's easy! There's a cactus we walk past on our nightly walk that I have (as of this very newsletter!) tentatively identified as cereus repandus (Peruvian Apple Cactus). It is a night blooming cactus, which means that when we walk past around 10-11pm the big white blooms are on display.
I'm absolutely garbage at identifying plants, but I do keep trying. This one I couldn't lock down until it started fruiting, and the fruits are very distinctive: huge, red, will split open and show a bunch of wee dark seeds like a dragon fruit (which is itself a night bloomer). Anyway, easy wonder available nightly. If I move to somewhere without one, I will miss it and harbour nostalgic feelings about how it looks under the moon.
To return to returning--unlike a very cool plant, it's a little more difficult to harbour wonder and joy about a place that became distant from you through time and has a couple layers of memory fogging the glass. We want, I think, things to be good in the same way they were good to us Once Upon A Time. Which isn't fair to anything, including ourselves. Sometimes, yes, things do get worse. Sometimes, yes, our original impression was too gilded. Sometimes though? It's still good, just in a different way, which is fine because we also have become different than we were when we first encountered something. Yeah, yeah, I just talked about getting over it when something you like stops existing, but it's a different bittersweetness when the thing is still there but the relationship between you and the thing has changed.
There was this all-you-can-eat place I loved as a kid. Unless you're from the specific chunk of place I'm from you will not have heard of it (also they're all closed now), but it was a chain and was a celebratory or family visit kind of special occasion place. The food wasn't spectacular, but it had some hits, very good potato coins, etc. In college at some point, I went to one with some friends because hey! Here was this place I'd only seen on the coast and hadn't been to in ages. It was, friends, Not Good. Like joke level not good. The kind of bad where you have to search inside yourself and ask "did I like actual garbage as food when I was ten?" And yes, but not like this. It became sort of a meme among the group--did our feelings about a place we used to love change or was it like [redacted name of buffet]?
I think we all have one of those. Or, maybe you've got one like this burger place we loved and went to semi-often. Not weekly, we've never been "going out to restaurant regularly" people, but often enough. You find your favourite burgers and rotate between the two each visit, that sort of thing. And sort of slowly, it started to suck. The prices went up bit by bit while the quality went down and the flavours sort of went flat. It was weird! It was weird to watch a place mature into sucking. Then one day we just didn't go back. Wasn't worth it. It happens!*
Boo, things change, we change, it sucks. But sometimes even with changes something remains good and wonderful. There's this place called Enchanted Forest near where I grew up and I went kind of often. We'd go for school trips, family trips, that sort of thing. It was made by a guy and his family and there are all the hallmarks of something made with more love than initial skill there. Some of the attractions use audio that clearly was recorded from a tape that had aged notably before they'd digitised it. Depending on when you go, the weather has worn some things notably. The second floors of things are stable and safe but also feel like some guy built them.
I know it has some "creepy" vibes for people who prefer perfection, and also I am aware that my regular exposure to it as a child through teen meant I'd interacted with the space in a range from when it was pure magic (little kid) to delightful near-nostalgia (teen). For a birthday in my 30's I finally visited as an adult and took my partner, Chase. Now, I was almost scientifically curious about how they'd react. He likes weird shit, non-polished things, but also Enchanted Forest is a PLACE and I knew I couldn't judge it objectively. I also was curious how I'd react. Would it be like 'You Can't Go Back' for me? Would the magic be gone?
We went before the season proper started, so it wasn't even running at full steam and it was: better than I had remembered, frankly. Getting to interact with the place as an adult I could enjoy not just the magic of it but the actual skill and joy and love that had built it. The wonder was still there.
There's a similar place near-ish where we live now that has the same "a guy built it and now tired teens run it" semi-rundown but still kicking energy. I love it. Maybe yeah, things change or things turn to shit, but a lot of things don't, or they change in a way that you can still delight in. Some places are better for being worn in.
*Truly wild I couldn't find a Know Your Meme or other easy explainer or link for the "el problema es el capitalismo" meme.
Here's some books I wouldn't have learned about if somebody hadn't mentioned them in their newsletter, so here I am, doing the same. Links go to the Storygraph entries for each title, a great place to check out content warnings and find ways to read them.
- The Sector General series by James White is a hell of a thing. He started writing these stories about a multi-species, non-human centric, hospital space station in 1957 and kept writing them until his death in 1999. The focus is deeply on learning to understand people you have less than nothing in common with, and figuring out how to help them. They're medical comedy-dramas and delightfully episodic. Someone in the family discord said the concept sounded like "some old school good times" and they're right. I picked up the first omnibus because it was mentioned in an issue of 70s Sci-Fi Art, which is a great weekly (?) newsletter of great things to look at, neat books to learn about, and often cool articles and playlists.
- Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series is a run of delightful post-prohibition mysteries. The books are all narrated in the sassy, annoyed voice of Archie Goodwin telling us about his boss (and probable best friend) Nero Wolfe, who is "eccentric" (never leaves the house, has a schedule more locked down than the daily journey of the sun, as just the tip of that personality trait), a fat guy who does not care that he is fat, and a wildly analytical mind who can solve the weirdest mysteries. And the weirdest mysteries get brought to him. I am eternally delighted by the way these two characters love each other and hate showing it, thank you to Ann Leckie's newsletter, which mentioned the pair in comparison to Robert Jackson Bennet's Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption. She also mentions "the series begins in 1934 and some things will not have aged well." So, heads up.
There's a tunnel at one of my favourite beaches that goes through a cliff. It somehow remains magical every time. Sometimes, on the other side, you find a lot of far-too-large-looking isopods clinging to the rocks and waiting for the tide.
Image description: A photograph of the wall of a concrete tunnel, where an eye and something scribbled out has been grafitti'd in sharpie. There's a hole in the wall and the light is shining through it glaringly. End ID.
For context of this next one, the caption from the Flickr page: "This was a place that had the creepiest damn Oscar fish in a tank. Then it was torn down to make a pub sort of place a year or so ago, then they decided not to."
Image description: A photograph with heavy blacks and sharp edges, of a sign on a pole that says "Poppios". It's a cute sign with metalwork scrolling at the top and bottom. It stands in front of a partly vacant and overgrown lot, a burned hulk of a building near the back of the property. End ID.
Some links for you! And links branching from links, even.
- There are lots of things I miss but one in particular is Google Reader. This was ages and ages ago, but it was like almost a mini-forum not-quite-social-media RSS thing where you shared clips of things in your RSS feed with friends, which was both like sending a pal an article and also recommending a magazine. It was very nice and made no money and was killed quite abruptly. The thing is, it was a really nice RSS reader, so I honestly fell off RSS when it died. I've since gone back on, and if you also are curious about curating your own newsfeed of goodies, this Curate your own newspaper with RSS guide from Molly White at Citation Needed goes over all the basics.
- The always splendid Mel Gilman has many delightful guides to foraging, some free and digital, others print and priced. But recently they mentioned it's getting acorn season so it's time for Eating Acorns, which are a good food to learn with for beginning foragers.
- Peacock feathers can be lasers from Rachel Berkowitz at Science (which, btw, you can just read using the Reader function in your browser if the site gives you guff), is fully what it says on the tin. The particular way that the "eye" feathers are made can make lasers! How structural colour works in general is Very Cool Stuff; find a more entry level explanation over at Chamistry World or a more in-depth look at this paper over at Nature.
On top of all the things going on, payment processors continue deciding they've the right to censor what people can purchase. It's some right bullshit and folks are doing some good work to fight back against it. The always wonderful St. John breaks it down in his latest newsletter. The whole situation is some right bullshit and folks are doing some good work to fight back against it, learn more on how to stop payment processors from deciding what adults do with their money at yellat.money and stop-paypros.neocities.org.
If you've thought of donating eSims, this guide was very helpful, and Crips for eSims for Gaza is a good option if you can't easily manage topping them up. There are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders. If you prefer giving directly to families, Gaza Funds is a nice resource that facilitates finding campaigns.