Multi-temporality

Spaceships don't come equipped with rearview mirrors 🚀

Dear Friends,

We thought we’d be in Oaxaca by now charting our future. Instead, I find myself in San Diego with my head turned toward the past.

When I was 26, I moved to where I belonged: the Bay Area. But San Diego was the backdrop to the glory days — that blessed stretch from 1996 - 2006 when rent was cheap, the Internet was fun, music was fresh, cell phones didn’t have screens, and Tom was everyone’s first friend on Myspace.

My sister and I driving up from San Diego to our new home in the Bay Area in August 2006

Mostly, I’ve been catching up with old friends and riding my bike around town on nostalgia tours: my first cigarette, my first apartment, the 7-11 where I worked the graveyard shift, the beach where I first smoked pot, and the taqueria where I ate a giant 2 am burrito a few hours later, giggling uncontrollably.

My favorite dancing bar. (Booty Bassment is still going 20 years later!)

Buried memories resurface — some painful, others exhilarating. I worry I’m becoming a sad, middle-aged man from a Springsteen song¹, especially as I read Rick Rubin’s celebration of attending to the present moment. “When we live in the moment rather than the past or future, we are spontaneous more than analytical; we are curious, not jaded. Even the most ordinary experiences in life are met with a sense of awe.”

Doesn’t that sound nice? Shouldn’t I stop thinking about the past and meet the most ordinary experiences of today with a sense of awe? As if Rubin detects that I’m not following the plan, he goes on:

When we miss it, it really does pass us by. Tomorrow presents another opportunity for awareness, but it’s never an opportunity for the same awareness.

I’ve heard myself give similar advice: Let go of grievances. We can’t change the past; we can only learn from it. But we can find beauty and joy in the present, and we can shape the future that we desire.

On December 13, 2003, my friend groups converged on One Last Big Party. The next week I would move to Mexico. But first I stopped at Gelato Vera Cafe, where I am today, to dream about the future.

How can I learn from the past without becoming distracted from the present or unable to move on to a better future?²

Middle age has gifted me a realistic appreciation of time passing. Finally, I know what it feels like to experience 20 years of history as an independent adult. I can relate to the passing of time from 1919, when WWI ended at the Paris Peace Conference, to 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland.³

And while the past 20 years — from the War on Terror to Trump & COVID to ChatGPT — have been uniquely zany to our modern times, the mere passing of two decades makes me feel closer to the past and more empathic toward 23-year-old me.⁴ If we ignore our past to focus entirely on the present moment, we don’t learn or grow.⁵

And so I’ve come to peace with “multi-temporality,” a mindful shifting between the past, present, and future. I make an effort to stay focused on the present moment with all five of my senses, but I don’t castigate myself for occasionally venturing into the past or dreaming about the future.⁶

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

December 18th marks the 20th anniversary of my first blog post. I’ve been writing in public for two decades and, my god, it’s mostly an embarrassment.⁷ 🙈

Part of my recent venturing into the past has been to spend an hour each day reading, archiving, and deleting blog posts from prior years.

A post from October 2006 recounts the time I was violently assaulted in a dark alleyway in Venezuela. I described how I wound up with the mugger’s national ID and why I intentionally titled the post with his full name:

I have no idea what to expect from the future. Five years down the road is hard enough to imagine; 60 years is impossible. Maybe Southern California will be blown off the map by a North Korean nuclear missile. Maybe national governments will cease to exist and all we’ll have left is the UN and local governments. Maybe there will be more crime, maybe less.

60 years down the road I’ll be 86 and Hector Enrique Calderon Contreras will be 83. Who knows what the Internet will be like at that point? Who knows if this blog will still be online and if it is, who knows how significant or insignificant it will become in the sea of searchable information?

But maybe, just maybe, sometime in the next 60 years Hector Enrique Calderon Contreras will come across this post and he’ll remember the night he mugged a gringo tourist. Maybe that laptop he scored that night changed his life. Maybe he learned how to use a computer, was able to get a job, and found himself inside the global economy.

Or maybe he sold it for $500 and used the money to buy drugs. Maybe he kept stealing. Maybe he wound up in jail or dead.

I am back at a familiar coffee shop in San Diego. I drag my cursor across his name, copy, open Google, paste. Sure enough, my blog post is still the first result, and then I see the second — a short article from a local newspaper that briefly mentions he was murdered in 2021 by a gang of young people he had reported for extortion.

I take out my AirPods and look up from my screen to process the information. Everyone else has earbuds pressed into their auricle, eyes squinting at a screen. For months after Hector Enrique assaulted me, my heart raced every time I heard footsteps behind me. How is it possible that I now have no emotional reaction to his murder?

The article was one more of dozens I read that day.⁸ How could I feel emotionally detached about Hector’s murder while friends rage about Israel’s invasion of Gaza without having ever been there? I recalled a quote from the artist and writer James Bridle (who was also born in 1980):

Part of what feels so particularly jarring about living right now is our ability to follow news events everywhere in the world at once as they’re broadcast in real time on social media. The crush of stuff happening only underscores our lack of agency in relation to it.

In history, humans have lived in uncertainty and helplessness, but we haven’t had it demonstrated to us on a minute-by-minute basis. It’s hard psychologically to deal with it.

I realized that it was time for some temporal shifting. I closed the lid of my laptop. A rare December fog had descended upon the coast, enveloping the concrete columns of the pier. Seagulls circled overhead searching for fallen scraps of breakfast sandwiches and burritos. I felt happy to be alive.

🎵 Best of 2023

12 months ago I shared some of my favorite albums from 2022. Now I’m culling my favorites from this year. So far, I’ve been going through all the predictable lists: Pitchfork’s (hilarious) take on the best songs of 2023, Gorilla vs. Bear, the Spotify playlists of the New York Times music critics, and NPR’s All Songs Considered (without Bob Boilen! 🥹).

Let me know if you’ve got other recommendations! Full albums only!

I hope you have a great week,

David

1. “Well, the time slips away. Leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days. They'll pass you by, glory days. In the wink of a young girl's eye.”

2. I meant that for myself, but Ted Johnson of the Us@250 project describes how the same question applies to our sense of national identity. We must reckon with (and debate) our past to see each other more clearly today and then re-imagine a better future together.

3. Alcohol was illegal in the US for 13 of those 20 years. 500 million people died in two years from the Spanish Flu. Women began to vote. The economy went gangbusters until the stock market crashed, causing an unemployment rate of 25%, a decade-long depression, and the New Deal. (Imagine, all of that is the 20-year prelude to WWII!)

4. As I have read back over blog posts and journal entries from that era, I see clearly how trying to understand my past has given me the freedom to imagine a better future and the courage to try it out.

5. The partner of a dear friend recently released a Sundance award-winning (and New York Times top-ten) documentary about a Chilean journalist who dedicated his life to rescuing the stories of victims during Chile’s dictatorship only to develop Alzheimer’s later in life and lose his sense of identity. In one tearjerking scene, he’s a young man at a press conference praising the importance of rescuing repressed stories to shape a more honest national identity. In the next scene, he’s an old man crying at his reflection and muttering, “I don’t know who I am.” Truly heartbreaking.

6. From the past, I feel awe for how far we’ve come as a species, and the need for social justice to address past wrongs. From the present, an appreciation of nature, culture, art, music, people, and beauty. From the future, the joys and angst of speculation about how culture, nature, and technology converge.

7. But also, a handful of them I loved … as if they needed to write themself and I was merely the receiver of a poetic transmission.

8. Venezuela has a shrinking population of around 27 million. Over 7.7 million Venezuelans have left during what the UN Refugee Agency calls “one of the largest mass population movements in the history of Latin America.” Venezuela’s president threatens to invade oil-rich neighboring Guyana to distract voters as elections approach, prompting the US to send aircraft carriers.