Nostalgia is rose-colored depression.
I scribbled that half-baked thought down in my Notes app the other day, perhaps still in a state delirium from a mysterious upper-respiratory illness that was no doubt given to me by an agent of the Deep State. Keep your eyes out these days. Anyways, I wrote down the words “nostalgia is rose-colored depression”, and those words are cursory. There is nothing more for me to say on the topic of nostalgia, at least not in the short term (if you wish to read an older work of mine about nostalgia, you can do so here).
But like most thoughts, this one did not come as a single entity, but rather as a horde of subsequent and related thoughts. One moment you’re reminiscing about the superior quality of the banana splits from your hometown ice cream shoppe, next thing you know you’re wondering if you should bleach your hair and start a dream pop band. So naturally I started thinking about the past after I wrote the word nostalgia. The winter season is to blame, as it is a period of reflectivity, and that rose-colored reflection is so bright sometimes that you blind yourself with optimism in the rear view mirror following you around with every decision you’ve made in your life up to this point. The past isn’t so scary though; it’s the ignorance of the past that sends shivering chills down the decaying spine. So I indulge myself.
Often I find myself thinking about the past lounging about on the couch in my living room, Don Draper style, legs crossed, head back, eyes on the ceiling, which separates the smoggy view of the ancient stars from my wandering eyes. Often when I’m lounging about on the couch in a prone position, I’ve had a few beverages of the fermented kind, either with friends or with self. Often I find the juke box is turned on, or in this case, the 21st century juke box, also known as the bluetooth speaker. And often playing on the speaker when I’m lounging about on the couch with ethanol in the bloodstream is a genre known as shoegaze1.
Beach House specifically. I have a long relationship with the band’s discography, dating back to 2014, when I was just a wee lad in high school, listening to their heroin-esque hooks and brooding, layered voices from their album Bloom in the basement of my friend’s house high off dime bag weed, UV Blue, and youthful hedonism. But Beach House really struck a chord on the piano strings of my soul when I unironically went on my first friends-only holiday trip to (no coincidence intended) North Myrtle Beach. Standing on those greasy shores with my best friends at the time is when their music hit home for me, and I have no idea why.
This past year, Beach House released an EP called Become, and I enjoyed it. Of the 5 songs on the track list, there is one that stood above the rest, and of course it is titled… Holiday House. My intention is not to write a lyrical interpretation essay; if you wish to seek answers, I would steer you to listening to the song yourself and coming to your own conclusions. I wrote one lyrical interpretation essay years ago and I told myself I would never do that again, neither for fun or for pay. What a terrible profession that must be. But I digress.
Listening to Holiday House scratched that nostalgic itch one has in the cobwebbed corner of the brain, but instead of leaving me with a feeling of longing melancholy, I was instead left with a feeling of gratuitous ease. Up until this point, I had never really considered the concept of a Holiday House. Sure, we take annual vacations with our families to various locations across the globe. Often our parents own or rent holiday homes in a fixed location, such as the Outer Banks or the Hamptons or the Palisades or Des Moines Iowa if that is your speed of life. As we grow older, perhaps we inherit these holiday homes, or perhaps we continue the tradition with our own offspring. We bring new lovers and longtime soulmates along for the trip, and they come and go with the seasons. The Holiday House has long been a tradition of humanity.
But I never really appreciated the concept until listening to that song and subsequently processing the meaning in my eyes. The expended effort. Imagine you have a large group of core friends: eight or ten or twelve or twenty of you, from college or childhood or wherever. You probably all met each other when you were young, stupid, and not otherwise obliged by life. Maybe you all even lived with each other at one point. You all at least lived in the same city. But life marches on; you graduate, you find love, you lose love, you find it again, you move away to another state, and one by one the core of the friendship is uprooted by the sprawling tentacles of responsibility. What remains is the memories, but more importantly what remains is the group chat. The group chat is the agora for regular check ins, life updates, general banter meant for everyone to see, and most importantly, the group chat is the spawn point for annual trips. With a never-ending tangled mass of conflicting schedules, the annual trip is difficult to plan, so you get the women involved. You plan, and you list the weekends you can and cannot attend, and you book a place and a flight, and you set it and often forget it. And then the week nears, and you develop a general itinerary. It could be hiking through the Rockies, rafting down New River, jet skis in Punta Cana, or just lounging by the pool. It really doesn’t matter.
And then the day comes. You pack your bag, tell your boss to fuck off you’re logging off early today, and you head to the airport or gas station to fill up before the long drive. You reminisce on the way there. You wonder if anyone will look different than the last time you saw them. Probably not, but sometimes social media lies. It doesn’t matter. The GPS tells you to exit the highway here, make a left, drive a few miles on this road, then make a right, drive a few more miles, and then the destination is on your left. As you pull up to the cabin, you see familiar vehicles in the driveway. You make note of the difference in appearance of the AirBnB between the advertised pictures and the naked eye. It doesn’t matter. You would’ve slept on a carpet in an alley if you had to. You park your car, grab your duffle, and make the slow walk up the driveway. There are all too familiar faces socializing in the kitchen; you can see the grins and laughs under the incandescent aura of the remodeled kitchen. The door is unlocked…
Hugs and kisses.
A cracked beer.
No such thing as the past or future.
Here’s to the Holiday House.
Onward,
Tony
Humble Wordsmith
Writer Boy
Memory Surfer
Drive all night
Up to the old driveway
Looking for the holiday house
Where love runs about
Make no mistake, Shoegaze is not a good genre. Not in the slightest. Shoegaze is the theater kid of music - overly serious to the point of parody, except there is no self-awareness of the parody. Shoegaze is putting all your time and effort into extra credit when you already have a 101 average in the class. Of course none of this commentary is valid, as I did not grow up during the years when Shoegaze first emerged, just like I hold no valid opinions on any music genre with a genesis before my time - that goes for classical, classic rock, bebop, or Mongolian throat singing. I wasn’t there. How can one possibly be a good judge of intention if one was not present? I suppose that is the mystery of faith. All I can say is if I like it or not, which is really the crux of any overly-artistic critique of art. So despite my venomous words towards Shoegaze, I listen to it because I like it, and because it makes me feel good in my own head.