a long time ago
When I was eighteen I picked up a Polaroid-- 80's, plastic, crappy-- that had been sitting around my room, and started taking pictures with it. I took what I did not know then to call selfies. My dad saw me doing this and gave me his old Polaroid, an SLR 680-- leather-covered body, glass lens, autofocus and flash.
I can tell you that the 680 is the best modern Polaroid in existence, because I've used the rest of them: 600s and Spectras and SX-70s. It's wild to think that this was a hobby of mine in college, buying various models used on eBay for $15 or $30 and shooting around campus with them. Film was $10 for a 10 pack at the Walgreens and the local photo store, where an employee once remarked that the only people who bought Polaroid film anymore were me and the cops. 
This was before decent cameraphones and long before Instagram; we had disposable and digital cameras, but the Polaroid was something of a rarity, and I quickly learned that it was the only camera people actually enjoyed posing for. There's some singular magic to the thing-- I don't know what it is-- but it makes people forget to make their camera faces. They make their real faces instead.
I'm not saying we were sober, either.
Anyway, somehow, simultaneously, as if on cue: they all started dying.
And then Polaroid announced they were going to stop making film. I was graduating anyway. It seemed fitting, somehow, that the Polaroid years would be a contained part of my life: 2005-2009. RIP.
But then my dad got the 680 refurbished for my birthday this year, and my friends bought me film. It won't be the same-- the film is more expensive and my phone is always at hand and I don't go that many parties anymore-- but it's just so nice. In a moment when old good things are ending (RIP, Awl) and it feels like time is flowing very fast in one direction, it's good to have an old beloved reappear, to see yourself in its gaze, changed and yet, you know, still so much your same old self.
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There's only one spot in my winter Writing Workshops LA class left! Join me for Non-Fiction I, yeah?
Also, if you want to read something truly vintage, there's an excerpt of my first-ever fan fiction at the end of this interview with North of the Internet.