I've carried a digital copy of Mitchell's piece around with me since it was first published almost a decade ago. I read it about three times a year, pretty much every time I get fairly depressed. The piece does a good job making me feel worse. That worsening eventually lightens my load. It reminds me that I'm not, after all, all alone, and slowly at the speed of a stalagmite, my diminuendo of a mood begins to soften.
One of the oddities attached to my love of the piece by Mitchell excerpted above is my seeming inability to remember its title.
I am blessed and/or cursed with what we used to call a photographic memory. Today--in the spirit of trying to make everything inaccurate, technocratic and obtuse--we call photographic memories eidetic memories. I don't know why. I don't know what was improved via that linguistic shift.
Despite my memory, I persist in calling Mitchell's piece not "A Place of Pasts," but "A Man Out of Time."
I suppose the highest praise we can have for someone else's writing is when we change it somehow and make it our own. I've taken Mitchell's piece and made it my story. Because I am a man out of time.
As Mitchell travels down the byways of his past, I spend a lot of time traveling down the winding routes of my memories. Of course, I still live in this horrific trumpian era where reality is topsy turvy and foul is fair and fair is foul.
I still live today, and work today, and make a living today, and talk to my family and people today, but today feels so often so void.
The other day, these words from Cole Porter hit me from my ear buds. They struck me as Macbethian as the Macbeth above, which I always trot out to mark the chaos of a disordered universe.
Of late, one way I mark my Man Out of Time-ness is by going to abebooks.com and ordering books I read when I was a boy.
Many of these books I stole from my absent father, who like me found comfort in surrounding himself with inanimate objects, mostly books that were old when he was a boy, that he probably stole from West Philadelphia High or snuck out of some lending library somewhere.
One such book arrived just now. It's called "The World Since 1914" and it cost me just $7, with $4 in shipping to get it to my small house in Connecticut from a tired old bookstore in Cincinnati, Ohio. You can tell I want something badly when I pay almost as much for shipping as I do for the book itself.
Of course, the book was obsolete when I first read it during the peak of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. I'm not even sure if the Since 1914 part included the entirety of World War II. I believe the world in this context stopped with Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, which I fear in the coming years many of us might regard as "quaint good old days."
But what makes me feel like a man out of time were the maps and illustrations in the book. They folded out. They were large. They were colorful. They were lightyears better than any map I can find online today. (Today, online maps rarely have scales. So you don't know the size of things or the distances between them.)
My sense of being a Man Out of Time comes from a simple modern predilection. Modern people throw things out without ever assessing whether or not what's replacing the thrown out object is actually better than what was tossed, or if it's just newer.
For instance, in order to have a "computer in our pocket," we've thrown out looking things up. We've thrown out noticing our surroundings. We've thrown out carrying around a paperback, or even the lovely little act of writing down a pretty girl's phone number on a torn piece of scrap paper. We've thrown out boredom for playing Tetris. And humming to ourselves for every song ever recorded.
More to the point, we've thrown out color maps. We've thrown out history. We've thrown out time and perspective, for the cacophony of always on chin-wagging.
We've thrown out old people with memory for young people to whom Justin Bieber was an era and fascism a set of cool flags and uniforms.
Every day I fight for the saliency of not giving up the out-of-time-ness of the advertising principles I believe in. That people won't buy something if they don't know what it is or what it does or why it exists or what makes it different. Every day, I go to the mat asserting that facts and information, neatly, cleverly and succinctly expressed matter more to brands than Dua Lipa or a spandex shrouded victim of botox. Every day I'm on repeat saying "a brand is a promise." Every day, I try to sell my 4 Ds and 3 Ms.
Etiam si omnes, ego non.
A Man Out of Time.
Even if all others, not I.
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