Category: Nostalgiaville

I had a moment not too long ago when I realized with no small amount of surprise that I remember an internet before YouTube.

It’s one of those things that, when I stop to actually think it through, only makes sense: I remember all kinds of “old things”: dial-up, GeoCities being the seeming building blocks of the entire world wide web (as it was called at the time, Netscape Navigator, newsgroups, and so on. I remember a world before the internet, and the fear and thrill and disbelief of the internet becoming a thing in the first place. (None of us really knew, if we’re being honest; I can remember talking to a researcher working on their PhD who was an internet evangelist in the mid-1990s and thinking in all seriousness, nah, this will never change our lives the way he thinks it will.)

But these days, looking things up on YouTube seems almost second nature when looking for video (or even audio). It’s a shorthand, an easy shared reference that everyone understands. The closest thing to a public utility, in some ways, even though it’s part of the Google Machine and very much not a public option in very meaningful ways.

I remember when YouTube was a new thing, and it felt strange to find actual video like that all collected together in one place; I have a sense memory of sitting at the computer in the first San Francisco apartment and looking things up on the site just because of the novelty of it all.

There was a point, back then — which feels almost parallel to when Blogger was relatively new, and there were other new ideas and formats being created to share things online — when the web felt like a new and exciting thing, and perhaps more importantly, a thing that had a real opportunity to be a Force For Good, whatever that might end up meaning in the grand scheme of things. Where every step was a step forward, even if it was just a small one.

We were all younger then, with no idea what a mess lay ahead of us all.

I had this moment the other week, catching sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, when I realized that I really could see my dad stare back at me. It was a disorienting instant, because for the most part, I don’t think that he and I look that alike at all — but I think that’s as much rooted in a misremembering of what he actually looked like versus the version in my memory, and my own mild body dysmorphia. (I say that somewhat glibly, but I always imagine myself taller and skinnier than I actually am.)

But, no: there he was, for the shortest of seconds. I could see him not only in my face (and in the whiteness of my beard, something that’s consistently a surprise to me; I feel like that went so white so quickly, as if it were just waiting for an excuse and then it received one in the stress of the past few years), but in my belly, my posture, my body as a whole. I looked in the mirror, and there he was, looking back.

It was something that stuck with me for awhile afterwards, as the shock of the moment mellowed out into something at first less stressful, and then almost grateful and happy for the feeling of continuity in my own life, and my family. A long time ago — a long time ago now, a lifetime, it feels like — I fretted and worried about essentially leaving my family to move to the States, and what that meant in an existential sense for me as… well, as a “McMillan,” whatever that might mean. Was I surrendering some essential part of me that I couldn’t put my finger on, in leaving my home country?

Seeing myself transform, even for the briefest of seconds, into my own father in the mirror was a surprise, welcome reminder that some things linger and remain, even when you’re not aware of them, even when you don’t think that they’re there.

That whole thing about “Never meet your heroes” is, I’m sure, a truism for a reason; I can only imagine the number of people who have had the misfortune to spend time with those people who have shaped their lives, only to discover with an unfortunate comment (or worse, an awkward silence) that things are not going well. I’ve had more than enough experiences meeting… well, not exactly “heroes” as much as “people who I thought I admired or respected from some distance,” that started uncomfortably and ended far worse, after all.

Meeting my “heroes,” though? It’s happened no less than three times, and in a surprise twist of fate, each time they turned out to be either exactly what I wanted them to be, or somehow even better. (Technically, one of these meetings is more “talked to repeatedly over Skype, Zoom, and other forms of internet communication,” but that counts, surely…? It feels as if it should, at least.)

Rather than embarrass myself with listing all three of these experiences here right now, I’ll mention just the first, in large part because it’s the one I was arguably the most nervous about. There was a period of time around the turn of the century — I really can’t remember which side of the changeover it was, because there was a lot going on in general at the time — where I was helping out a local arts group I’d gotten myself involved in; I did their newsletter and, when I was in the same town as them (which was not often, for awhile; like I said, there was. a lot going on), I’d sit in on meetings or help out in their rented art space. At one of the meetings I missed, it was decided to get a visiting artist in to help bring people to said art space. It was also decided that that artist would be Bill Drummond.

When I found this out, I re-arranged what would I self-consciously avoided calling my schedule to make sure I’d be in town to meet him. This was Bill Drummond, after all — co-founder of the KLF, artist, musician, and for the intents of my hero worship, writer of 45, a book that was as friendly, curious, and kind about pop culture as I could imagine. He was, in many ways, who I wanted to be when I grew up. I had to meet him, if I had the chance, I thought, even as I winced at the possibility of embarrassing myself as soon as I opened my mouth.

By the time he showed up, I had managed to get myself entirely wound up by the paranoid certainty that it would go badly. I’m going to say something stupid, I thought to myself, or he’s going to be terrible. There’s no other way this can go. For days leading up to the event, I just got more and more convinced that disaster was around the corner, but I still had this need to meet him, no matter what. When would I get this chance again?

I needn’t have worried; he was charming, patient, and chatty. He was odd, and off-kilter, in the best of ways, with stories that seemed to go on too long and not long enough at the same time. I remember him as being tall, which I have no idea if it’s true or not, but feels like it should have been, just because of how it felt after I’d met him — as if something magical had happened, in the most literal sense of that phrase: something nonsensical and meaningful, but outside of the realms of logic or common sense. I remember walking home that night more clearly than I remember actually meeting him, just feeling awash with the possibilities of a world where such a thing had happened, when there was no reason why it should have.

The older I get, the more I realize that my long-term memory is very keyed off of sense memory and instants, rather than any coherent narrative. I’m not sure if this is the way that things work for everyone else or if I’m the odd one out, but I remember a chain of events as if it’s something I’ve read or been told, even when they’ve happened to me — something that I shorthandedly think of as flattening events into a straight line — while I can remember absolutely everything about very specific, seemingly meaningless, instants or seconds that just nonetheless feel fully immersive as soon as I even nod in their general direction.

I was thinking about this lately as I prepped for this year’s Emerald City Comic Con. I offhandedly tried to remember what the weather was like the year before, so I could think about what clothes to pack, and instead of any coherent “well, on the Thursday of the show, it was like this” response, my brain immediately flashed back to running from the hotel to the convention center on the first day, trying not to think too much about the rain as I listened to “Reviewing the Situation” by Sandie Shaw.

I remembered crossing the roads, the precise path I took and the sense of, Well, this year’s show needs me to do X, Y, and Z as I did so, listing off that day’s to-dos to make sure that I didn’t forget anything important. (I did, but I remembered before it was too late.) I remembered the coffee shop I passed, thinking, maybe I should get something now while I have the chance and then convincing myself that I should be responsible and get it done after my first work for the day. (A bad decision; work took over and suddenly it was lunchtime and I was starving.)

I remembered everything with such clarity and detail, even though it was this minor moment on the way to a show. But when I try to think, well, what happened on the Thursday of the show last year, it’s as if I’m reciting a list to myself instead of anything so detailed. I can’t work out if this is a gift, a curse, or simply the way everyone’s memory works… and if I think about it too much, I just end up derailed on another odd sense memory from years ago…

Occasionally, I think about how unlikely my life has been; about the fact that my job — writing about pop culture, but especially nerd culture, for the internet — didn’t really exist even when I moved to the United States two decades ago — and about the fact that I did move to the United States two decades ago. For that matter, thinking about the fact that, somehow, I ended up working, if not in then at least tangentally connected to the industry that I always wanted to as a kid. How did all of that happen?

When I ask that question, I tend to answer it by thinking that it all started when I went to art school, lo those many decades ago. I’ve said multiple times that the most valuable thing about that whole experience, all five years of it (there was a Masters degree in there, too; if we’re adding in the time I spent teaching at the school as well, we’re up to seven years), wasn’t the official lessons, such as they were, because those were ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things — I studied graphic design just as digital tools were being introduced, so the majority of the practices I was taught were no longer industry standard by the time I graduated.

Instead, what I came away with of value was the fact that I had five years of just… possibility. Of being around people not only being creative in their own practices, but encouraging others to be the same way; of being tasked with doing new things on a regular basis, even if I was neither good at, or fond of, the majority of them; of having a feeling that I could try new things and fail at them, and that was part of the process as opposed to a bad thing. Looking back at it now, I see the whole thing as an extended lesson in the “Yes, And” theory of improvisation; a chance to just be comfortably uncomfortable for an extended period of time.

All of this was brought to mind the other week, reading Peter Capaldi talk about how the opportunity for poor people to have this experience has basically disappeared because of government cuts in the UK, and realizing how lucky I was to be born when I was, how lucky I was to have that chance. My life has been impossibly fortunate, when I stop and think about it. It’s good to appreciate that, every now and then.

When I was a kid and thought that I wanted to work in comics — basically, my entire teenage years, if I’m honest — I found myself utterly fascinated with the idea of newspaper comics. I’m not entirely sure why that was the case; there really wasn’t much of a tradition of newspaper strips in the UK by the time I was a teenager, beyond the obvious American imports, but over and over, I imagined scenarios where I’d be responsible for writing and drawing a newspaper strip on a regular basis. (To the point where I almost submitted a package to my local paper, surreally; the ego I must have had to even consider that!)

I mention this because one of my fascinations with the newspaper comic idea was a very particular part of that: the Christmas supplement. Again, looking back, I have no idea where this came from, as I’m not sure it was a thing at the time I was growing up, but I was obsessed with the possibility of a pull-out section where I’d have multiple pages to just play with for the holidays and do whatever I wanted with, for an audience, as long as it was appropriately festive.

Cut to my third year in art school. By this point, I’d been doing something akin to newspaper comics for the student newspaper for a year or so with my then-best friend, Andy Barnett; we’d kind of fallen into it and been successful with it, much to our surprise. By the holiday season of that third year, though, we’d fallen out of favor with the new editor of the paper, and had resigned ourselves to maybe focusing on our studies instead.

And then, we found out that the editor had quit, and that the old editor was panicking to try and get the holiday issue out in time. A call came in: could Andy and I possibly fill up, say, eight issues of the issue by ourselves? We were on the way out, obviously, but if we could hit this deadline, it would really help everyone out…

I knew immediately what we needed to do, and thankfully Andy agreed. And that was how, in my early 20s, I got to fulfill a teenage dream I’d long since forgotten: a Christmas supplement of our own to play with. Think of it as a Christmas miracle with admittedly low stakes, but a miracle nonetheless. ‘Tis the season.

For whatever reason, I didn’t really take photos of my wandering around Glasgow on Monday morning, as I had done with Gourock and Greenock the couple of days prior; maybe because it wasn’t so early, and therefore more busy? Or that I’d had to take a train to arrive there, and therefore it felt more like a destination than a dérive? (In that there were things that I wanted to do in the city, as opposed to wandering for the sake of wandering as had been the case the two days prior, it was more of a destination, I suppose…)

Nonetheless, I found a similar sense of disorientation in Glasgow as had met me in the last two towns, despite having been there just a few months prior. (We made it there in April, and even got to walk around the west end a little; today’s wandering was far longer, and more widespread.) I walked in the directions that felt like muscle memory, only to discover locations had closed, moved, or in one case, the entire building just didn’t at all anymore. Instead, there was a passageway into an external courtyard that wasn’t there the last time I’d looked.

Even places that did still exist were different, in surprising ways: Had that building always been that color? Was that road always closed off to traffic coming in that direction? What is the “high level” of the train station, when it seems like ground level to me? And so on.

There’s been so much that I’ve enjoyed and appreciated about the Scotland stay this time around — not least of which, I stepped away from work for four days, which I very, very much needed — but perhaps my takeaway from the whole thing is that very clear sense of You can’t go home again, because so much has changed. Which only makes sense — it’s been 15 years or so since I’ve been to most of these places, and that’s a long time — but, at the same time, it underscores the ways in which I don’t belong here anymore. (If I ever did…)

Wandering through my hometown for the first time in more than a decade was an emotional, disorienting experience. I found myself surprised by just how beautiful it was, and in ways that I’d either taken for granted or else never even noticed when I lived there: how open the skies felt (smaller buildings, for the most part), how close I was to the river and the beautiful mountains just across the water. This was all background noise when I was growing up, of course, but after decades of city living — and I love living in cities, I should add — I found myself surprised and touched by what I was seeing.

Similarly, I got genuinely emotional seeing the house I grew up in again; I’d prepared for this back in April but didn’t manage to make it on that trip, so I’m not quite sure I expected the actual, audible gasp that I made on seeing the house again, and the flood of feelings and memories and thoughts that came with it. (They’d painted the storm door! It’s white now, as opposed to black, which just felt odd. And there’s a side stairwell because the one house has been split into two apartments, but otherwise… it’s where I spent almost 20 years of my life. It held power, and I wasn’t ready, really.)

Perhaps the strangest thing, though, was going downtown again. Downtown Greenock was never a happening spot for hepcats, but I had my internal geography based on particular memories, particular locations… and they’re almost entirely gone now. That’s probably to be expected, given that it was almost 20 years between visits… but at the same time, they’re gone and replaced by vape shops, or a multitude of To Let signs. There was a block where every second storefront was a bookmakers (that’s a betting shop, not somewhere that makes books, for those who don’t know); what I knew as a bank had been replaced by a funeral services planner. It all reminded me of something, but I couldn’t put my finger on what until I saw what had been a big grocery store when I was a teenager had become a food bank that it struck me: it was as if Bedford Falls had become Pottersville. Clarence, what am I supposed to do…?

I had walked into town in a sad, lonely melancholy mood — this was Day 11 of the trip, after all, and even though I was visiting family, I missed my family back home, and I missed home, too — but there was something about this dérive that recharged me and made me feel more grounded both in where I’d come from, but also where I am these days in life, too. I couldn’t even begin to explain why, but it was true, and I was grateful for it.