Blind Spots

 The 1980s was a decade in which I saw that we had taken a futuristic turn. We abandoned the real existence we lived during the 1960s and 1970s. I always felt that the 1950s through the 1970s were what real life was. What happened in the 1980s was some space-age dream we might suddenly get over.

So we went, complaining about punk and new wave music, front-wheel-drive cars, and the addition of electronics in the new album releases of our favorite musicians. The 80s were too much like the Jetsons—polished, synthesized, and overproduced into a chrome shine. In our bumbling yet instinctive analog way, we easily walked our 1970s walk through the 1980s, knowing that things were catching up with us. Computers were in some people's living rooms, but not ours; we could not afford them. Telephones were in most people's houses, but not ours; we did not need them. 

Photo by Derek Story on Unsplash

None of us knew what was next. From watching Video Killed the Radio Star in August of 81 on a channel that seemed to think it could somehow pipe music with images into our homes 24 hours a day, to the shuttle program sending astronauts into space so often it became commonplace. Faster and faster, the wheel began to spin, and we packed all of this into our little lives with all of the wisdom of the seventies but a chip of vanity on our shoulders that somehow made it ours personally.

There are many ways to look at an era, but none is as precise as when we look back upon it. Ten years out, we feel so much pain. Twenty years out, sadness. Thirty and forty years later, we realize we were sitting on a time bomb in which infinite combinations of perfect events were falling into precise chambers, locking a fate too bleak to imagine. We were headed for oblivion. The world would never be like it was then. Little did we know that the foundation was being built to tear everything down. 

In the summer of '87, I was timeless and immortal. I was 21 and thought that I would live forever. My parents were just over 40; they would also be here forever. In a room downstairs, I was listening to the waves. Mister Petty pleaded with me and tried not to panic as he did, but it would never be the same. Everything. Everything is changing.

I was changing lanes, telling myself that, at some point, I would know where I actually was. The woman I knew did not wave from the ship as it pulled further away from the land. I wished I could be as well adjusted, but expected to be eventually. The music filled my space, and it was music about loss. Loss indeed was happening, and I was not totally getting it. There was an explosion several miles away. I saw the shockwave closing in in the rearview, but I had no idea what it meant.

The notes mourning are not for something that happened or perhaps even happening. This was big; everything was in jeopardy. A chilling realization comes to light between bursts of emotion upon which my gravity starts and stops. The world is still spinning. The centrifical expansion of whatever caused all of this is still unfolding. Time says I'm used to being alone. I try to know what I have and be there wearing all my folly as armor. But two seasons later, I always see a better way.

Nobody ever told me that youth ignorance is so formidable. As terrible as it is, they had a responsibility to paint warnings on the asphalt of the streets, plaster billboards, and write them on the sky. I cannot be sure they were not already doing that because one thing I do know: I was not listening.

Are we all this blind? So fallen? So unwise? Or does that belong to those who have no questions? They never rethink, recount, or recall how they could have made it all better, and then let it haunt them at highs and lows in years to come, calling themselves out, over and over again.

Could it be that living those moments again and again is helping now, turning hours into minutes when it counts? Could any bad decision made today become a three-month deviation from the journey? I have to believe. The blind spots were there, and I will always hold myself in contempt for not being able to see better through the fog. I guess I am depending on time to get it out of my mind.