3: Phases, Stages, Eras: Memories of Want

Is there any scientific understanding of when we start retaining our earliest memories? Is it different for every person? Is there the possibility of a person who remembers basically everything?

My earliest memory may be fake, but I've had it a long time. I'm in a crib or similar holding pen and I'm taking in things, like shapes and distances. I remember where my dad was standing. It's probably bullshit since I stopped using a crib when I turned twelve. 

The best (most reliable) memories from my really early childhood are from home videos. As usual, I was lucky here because the camcorder was released the same year I was. 

We have video of my second birthday. I look like a pit bull puppy with Alfred Hitchcock's head awkwardly resting atop the shoulders, no neck to be found. I have a frickin' rad firetruck birthday cake. The house is packed. I didn't have a thought in my bulbous head. It's beautiful.

I wasn't quite this cute, but close!

We also have video of a few of my adolescent birthdays, and a collection of videos from our trip to California in the early 90s. By then I'm a real annoying brat so they are harder to watch. But the fashion...my god, the fashion! I was more neon than child! I'm still really glad we have them because my memories from age 7-10 are pretty limited, and the videos are illuminating. I was a huge Rick Astley fan, unironically, and when given a chance to say anything I wanted to the camera, I talk about how great his music is 😐😑💥

Why did this ever go out of style and when it is coming back?

[Aside:This is usually the point in writing about myself that I stop and quit, thinking no one will quite care enough about me to read this. But the truth is, I wish everyone I knew had a blog like this that I could read. I'm going to always keep writing for myself and I'll be happy if people either read my blog or write their own...which I would then read 😇]

Outside of those homevideos, I need a LOT of help to remember specific ages and years. I have all sorts of gimmicks to help me remember even the most recent years and milestones. With all that in mind, I'd like to do my best to embarrass myself while getting organized with a rainbow-hued, fart-scented trip down memory lane as I reintroduce myself to the many moods of John "Jack" Gremmer.

STAGES OF JACK: A Recollection of Material Lust

1. The Action Figure Stage

This is probably like a third of the He-Man toys, not to mention the textiles!

I was definitely wanting from the minute I was born but this was the first real phase I remember. These fuckers were expensive for a little kid, especially considering they didn't do a damn thing. I was a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe SUPERFAN and, thanks to some seriously key Christmases, I had all the swag. I'd watch the cartoon every week to inform myself on what to scream at my father the following week until he broke down and bought it from Toys R Us. They had his card on file. The most obnoxious thing (for parents) about these action figure lines was that the merchandising was shamelessly endless. If you liked He-Man, and your dad's credit card was on file, you could basically live in Eternia and sleep with a She-Ra down your pants. Or whatever. And the truly crazy thing was the action figures themselves got MORE expensive as I got older. By the time I was into Super Naturals and Battle Beasts I had to scream at my dad for TWO weeks before he'd break - and the accessories were necessary. Good news for me, horrible news for my dad.

These had holograms built into them! RADICAL!

Fleer Ultra X-Men 1994

2. The Card Stage

And you thought action figures didn't do anything! It wasn't until I was thirty years old that I put two and two together and realized buying packs of cards at that age was as close as kids can get to lottery tickets. I mean, they put the cards right next to the candy cigarettes. And these aren't the good lottery tickets either, where you play for fun on a whim with your coworkers. No, the ones that have been sitting in the shitty gas station for months and are just waiting for someone desperate to slunk in and actually try to win. It probably started harmlessly with my neighbor showing me a pack of baseball cards, but by the end I was spending every cent I saved or earned on cards: X-Men, Marvel, Swamp Thing, I think I had cards from BLOSSOM the fucking TV SHOW! I was obsessing over a collection that served no purpose outside of being a collection and spending a lot of time at Sportsland Collectibles, a card shop appropriately sandwiched between a laundromat and a gas station. You'd see these sad sack adults buying cigarettes and lottery tickets at the gas station and, just next door, the next generation was rolling the dice on trash. 

Saturday Night Live trading cards...?!

3. The Music Stage

This stage hit the hardest and is the first on the list to still be going. It is also the first material want on the list that, even to a child, had a real value and function. My sister and I would dub songs we liked off the radio onto cassettes and be blown away that we could listen to it over and over, whenever we wanted! As my parents and their poor minivans can attest, I've spent more time shopping for CDs than any other activity and I never get sick of it!!!

I had this exact model but it was way before earbuds, always cheap plastic headphones

4. The Video Game Stage

I was too young for Nintendo when our family got it, but I got a kick out of watching other people play. I really came of age with Sega Genesis. My friend Chong Xiong (I love writing and saying his name, feel free to do so if you're having a rough day) had a Genesis and a ton of games and I'd go to his house after school (2nd grade?) to play. I was sort of middle class when it came to games; my family always got the latest system, but I'd have to wait for a holiday. For example, I have an incredibly tubular photo of me playing Donkey Kong Country...on Christmas morning...wearing a Big Dog t-shirt. BA-BOOM! In sixth grade, at sleepaway camp, I met not one but two new RICH friends. I turned into a monster at home...I really did want everything, and didn't I deserve it? 😈 When Mortal Kombat 2 came out, I politely told my mom, "Buy me MK2 or go to hell!" She got all high and mighty, talking about money, how much it cost, the cost, all this stuff. She told me I had to make choices in life (?!) - if I was willing to skip the sixth grade chorus trip to Great America, I could have the game. Considering I didn't even know I was in chorus, it was an easy choice. This was a big step up financially for me, stage-wise. The average video game cost TEN TIMES as much as a used CD back then. When I saved up for weeks to buy one, and it sucked, I wept. I still play video games (PS4) but this stage came to a halt when I met my interactive-media soulmate Mark Howe and I decided to become a nerd.

For people whose parents wouldn't let them wear Coed Naked

5. The Computer Game Stage

When I met Mark at the end of sixth grade, he already had a big collection of computer games. I glommed onto him immediately and passionately LOL. Mark, our friend Weston and I, along with a rotating cast of neighborhood characters, made sure to buy basically every computer game that came out. It was incredibly expensive, but with birthdays, Christmases, chores, etc, we were making it work. I lived at Electronics Boutique in Port Plaza Mall. All the employees knew me, we felt sorry for each other in a poignant way. As someone who lived the life, all the stereotypes about computer gamers are true. I was a pathetic mess and the more I played the more I wanted to play. I can't wait to write more about my semi-professional stint playing Quake online, mainlining cookie dough and doing lines of Mountain Dew Icee. The point is, at a critical point in my social life, ages 13-15, the only things I cared about were my computer, my cookie dough, and my internet connection. 

The corpse of Port Plaza Mall

6. The Guitar Stage 

After a nice long wallow in the Mountain Dew mud, I realized I needed to get laid. I'm sorry to be crude, but I'm a strict evolutionist and there is no resisting the hormones besieging a chunky, pop-punk loving computer game nerd - oily and slithering through puberty. I'm actually impressed that I realized I would need to get my life together - and I did! I started lifting weights, I replaced all my pop-punk band t-shirts with Abercrombie polos, and I took up guitar. Guitar actually came naturally to me, probably the first thing that did since wanting stuff. In the very early days I would learn one song at a time, usually for a girl, and then get mad and forget it when she didn't want to go out with me. But eventually I started taking lessons and got as serious as an idiot in high school can. This was the stage that pulled me toward adulthood, or at least a reasonable suspended adolecensce. For one thing, performing music really IS a great way to meet people - and a certain percentage of them will fall in love with you. It certainly worked for me back then, since everyone noticed I was in shape and playing guitar with some of the cool kids. Although there is an incredibly fertile material want associated with playing the guitar, like amps and gear and more guitars, this was the first stage in my life that was more than killing time and wasting my money. Sure, it was about getting laid, but I'm growing up, people! 

My first "real" guitar, 1999 Gibson SG Special

7. The Book Stage

Once I had a steady girlfriend and my hormones were satisfied, I was able to read again. For the first time in a decade, I was able to read! Plus, I thought I knew everything. This was age 19-23, still very much in the guitar stage, but now I was "educated" LOL. After reading stuff in college like Crime and Punishment and The Turn of the Screw, I decided I needed a bookshelf. After that I bought books. I stopped selling back my books at the end of a semester and kept them, eventually giving them away. Whoops. With my college graduation money, I bought Encyclopedia Brittanica's Great Books of the Western World, a fifty-four volume collection of classics from Homer to Dostoyevsky. I sat in my basement, eating disgusting frozen pizza, reading Machiavelli and Chaucer in basketball shorts. It was super classy. I absolutely love reading and am stupidly impressed with how much I've read and can reference, and a lot of it was consumed during this time period. When I look back on the course of my life, I think it was only because I was in this stage when I was that I survived the quarter-life crisis. Shortly after I graduated from college, most of my friends had moved away, my girlfriend and I had broken up, and I had quit a job I hated. It was a low point for me, and it was at that time and place that I found, or rather was given, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. It became basically the first and last book I've ever read, changed how I approached my life and thought about myself, and ushered in our eighth and current (final?) stage 😮

Impossible to pick a favorite book, but if I can only choose one...

8. The At Peace Stage (The Cat Stage)

With the help of The Power of Now, I slogged through a period of intense loneliness and confusion that I'm sure is very typical for that age. In other words, I was single. I can trace the start of the cat stage, and who I am today, back to the laundromat in Madison where I finished reading Power of Now and started making changes. It took several years of struggling and fucking up, really specifically 2006-2010, but I was making progress. Most importantly, I wasn't in any other stage: I had come to the realization that I would have to be happy with who I was or I would never be happy. My cat Bubby helped a lot with that. She came into my life in 2006 and flipped my world around. It was a real pleasure to worry about something else for once. Her simple emotions, fear and joy, put everything in perspective for me. I spent a lot of time with her and it made me more patient. I started to need less to be happy, and found myself buying fewer things. I saw an opportunity for a happy life and took it, thinking I would be happy alone with my cat, my books, my computer games...my guitar. And just like they always say, the minute I was OK with being alone, I met my wife and the rest is history. When we started dating, I was in a great place emotionally, floating peacefully through my cat stage, everything for joy, nothing for fear. I love my cats and all of our friends' pets. I think taking care of animals is the best and most common sense way to remain grounded and patient these days; they will always remind you of how little it can take to be happy and the value of earned trust. I'm happy to be in this stage now and be able to look back with joy rather than anger on how I got here.

 Me and Doodleberg "working" on the blog

As always, thank you for reading some or all of this! 

Lots of love from me, Sara, and the cats 💓