Datamancer's Steampunk Workshop Highlighted by The Wall Street Journal

An Aside - A Moment of Nostalgia - a Longing for Futures Lost

You know, a long time ago, being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody's crazy. - Charles Manson to Diane Sawyer, ABC's Turning Point, March 9, 1994.



I don't know the people in this video, and yet they are like familiar ghosts - walking the halls of a past that is all too familiar, all too vivid still; it literally pains me to watch, and yet I can not look away. We rarely realize when a place or a moment will become enshrined, iconic in the myth we build, our imagined history, of ourselves, for ourselves.

Tonight I searched YouTube for such a place (time) in my own past - and found a video so eerily familiar that I might have as well found an idealized window into my own mind, my own (re-imagined) past.

I need only squint my eyes, blur these peoples faces slightly and 20 years fall away. The smell, the sound of the sea surrounds me, friends lost are with me briefly, again; and my futures seem to open ahead of me.

If only I knew then... There are a thousand things I would tell those friends. I would start with just how much I miss them.

Ted, Damon, Tom, Ben, Crystal, Josh, Anna, Serge, Margo, All of you at Mr Toots, all of you, I still think of you often. I miss you. I really do.