Month: June 2021

Another weekend spent watching some of Small Axe, Steve McQueen’s stunning collection of movies about the Black experience in the UK — and, really, in London — in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, and watching Mangrove got me thinking about the turbulent times I grew up in, and how much of that permeated my worldview as a kid.

It’s not just that I grew up during “The Troubles,” as they were euphemistically known at the time; I remember seeing news reports about IRA attacks and the various explosions and murders that happened around the United Kingdom for the first decade-plus of my life, and feeling ill-at-ease at the idea that sometimes places could just explode and kill everyone and there was no way of knowing when and where it would happen. I also remember finding it strange and almost amusing that members of Sinn Féin, the Irish political party that supported the IRA, weren’t allowed to speak in their own voices on British television, leading to their voices always being dubbed during interviews. (To be fair, I still find that odd.)

There was more than that, though; I half-remember things like the Miners’ Strike, or the Brixton Riots; there were news reports at the time when I wasn’t really paying attention to the news and also wasn’t quite sure if the news was fictional or not. There were just scenes of people fighting and very serious heads talking at the camera and it seemed as if it couldn’t be real, and yet…

It was later, it was at a point where I’d more or less realized what was going on, but I remember the Poll Tax Riots, too; I knew what they were about, and I was angry in the sense that you can be when you’re in your mid-teens and filled with an equal mix of certainty and stupidity (or, at least, lack of knowledge) in a way that only teens can be.  It was similar to being younger and knowing the phrase “Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher,” even if the context was somewhat lost on me.

I feel as if I grew up at this important, busy, part of British history, and that I was only properly there for half of it, if not less. I wonder how I’ll feel, decades hence, about the past few years?

I get the idea of pop culture nostalgia overriding critical faculties, believe me; as much as I get frustrated at seeing long-running comic book series turn into a series of seemingly never-ending re-runs and repetitions of previous successes — just today, Marvel announced the new X-Men series Inferno, which just so happens to share its name with the X-Men storyline from (checks notes) thirty-two years ago — I can’t deny that there are certain things that I grew up with that I find myself drawn to, over and over, in indefinable ways that I long to return to as an adult.

In almost every example of those things, though, it’s never actually a reboot or a retelling that I find myself craving. Whether it’s G.I. Joe, Transformers, or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe — I am a child of the ’80s, and happy to be so; I feel that it’s the highpoint of a kind of toy line that crossed over into cartoons and comics in a way that was both cynical for the times and effortlessly innocent in retrospect, and endlessly charming to me as a result — I never actually want to see a recreation of whatever I loved as a kid, and it’s also not enough to re-watch old cartoons and re-read old comics even with all the nostalgia that might bring.

(The old G.I. Joe comics in particular bring a lot of the old feelings back; in contrast, I find the old cartoons so bad that I’m almost pained to know that I liked them way back when.)

Instead, what I want is for something new — whether it’s new versions of stories with those characters and concepts, or something entirely new — to make me feel the same thing as I felt back when I was a kid and discovering these thing for the very first time.  That’s an impossible ask, I know, but ultimately, that’s what I’m nostalgic for, what I’m missing: A way to feel that sense of possibility and excitement again.

The heat has arrived in Portland, and with it, the inexplicable discomfort of realizing that there is nowhere comfortable to exist once the temperature reaches a particular point.

To be clear, I’m not talking about a minor heat; because Portland weather is a wonderful cornucopia of temperature at the best of times, we’ve somehow gone from days in the high sixties and low seventies with some clouds and occasional rain to, yesterday, full sun and nearly 100 degrees, with almost no ramp-up in-between. It’s as if someone turned a dial all the way after realizing that it’s June now, and that’s basically summer.

I don’t deal well with heat. I never have; I was a kid who spent summers indoors, lying on my back reading comics, because that way I could find some shade and keep myself from turning red and sweaty. (This wasn’t a family trait; at the first rumor of sun, my dad would strip down to short shorts and pretend that he was very interested in gardening so that he could be outside, ending every day looking like a boiled lobster.) As an adult, I like to think I’ve maintained a healthy distrust of getting sunburned, to the point of knowing when to stay inside for my own good.

But the heat, though. The heat.

I do not deal well with heat. I try my hardest; I drink lots of liquids, I hang around big box fans and look for any sign of breeze whenever possible, I stick my head in the freezer at irregular intervals whenever necessary — you know, the usual stuff. None of it helps, though; no matter what I do, my body responds to high temperatures in the same way: by surrendering entirely, losing all but the barest erg of energy, and covering me with a thin film of sweat as often as possible, no matter how often I try to douse myself in cold water.

When it gets sunny and warm, there’s nowhere I can go to find relief, it feels. Everywhere is just as uncomfortable and sweaty as I fear. All I can do is hope for good AC and a swift return to sensible temperatures.