Hoarding Nostalgia

I am someone who doesn’t really like to throw things away.  Case in point: I have this old, beaten up messenger bag that has been with me since 2005.  I started using it regularly in 2006, and it basically became the thing I carried with me everywhere I went. I stuffed things into it, forced its buckles to snap shut - tore at it, dragged it through the rain, threw it, dropped it, scraped it against all manner of things.  Surprisingly, though I imagined myself carrying this messenger bag, which I began to call my “murse” throughout the streets of lower manhattan (and I did - my senior year at NYU), I mostly toted it with me in Northern NY - to and from work at this crappy little water park called the Enchanted Forest/Water Safari. No one even bothered to make fun of me, because they knew I didn’t care.  When I moved on to Columbus to attend The Ohio State University, the bag came with me.  I carried it with me everywhere.  It became rather threadbare.  It came with me still to Stony Brook, NY, to my first professional job.  It’s with me now in Montclair, NJ.

The thing became even more threadbare.  The canvas is torn, the leather cracked and water damaged.  It looks like a cross between a GI ruck and an old bomber jacket.  While it is definitely an Eddie Bauer messenger bag, the bag is not in any way labeled Eddie Bauer, other than a small green tag on the inside.  My wife and I began discussing that the bag was heading toward the trash heap.  It has gone beyond “shabby chic” to downright beat the hell up.  The reason I write this aching paean to my wonderful messenger bag, my companion that is constantly slung carelessly from left shoulder to right hip (and never right shoulder to left hip - that’s never felt right), is that I just got two messenger bags for christmas.  These are not the first messenger bags I’ve received since getting my “murse.” I’ve gotten four as welcome gifts - three from Stony Brook, one from Montclair.  I even gave one of my Stony Brook bags back to Stony Brook because I wasn’t going to use it.

I bought an expensive messenger bag online - one that had space for my laptop, from Manhattan Portage.  Have you been to the Manhattan portage site?  It’s crazy!  They are charging crack prices for messenger bags!  I bought one that was rated to fit both a laptop and 12” vinyl albums.  (There was a record store in Columbus that I used to go to called the SInging Dog records, and I’d specifically bring my Manhattan portage each time so that, in case they had Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” album on vinyl, I could put it in my MP messenger bag… which, I guess, makes it an MPMB, which sounds like a weird prog rock band… because I figured it would need padding, since it’s out of print and super expensive.  Like, $200 on eBay expensive.  Like, makes Manhattan Portage look like a fucking bargain expensive.  Like, Bruce, come on, reprint the album on Vinyl so that original press copies go down in price and I can get one for a totally respectable $50.  I don’t want to be giving a squeezer to a guy who looks like an Allman Brothers roady (sp?) just to afford the single most valid artistic response to the September 11th terror attacks. Though, just FYI, if you’re a guy who looks like an Allman Brothers roadie (better?), get at me. I mean, if you have access to a copy of Springsteen’s the Rising on Vinyl. Otherwise, beat it.)  I still have it, and I think it has some chap sticks and a shout wipe or two in it.  I use it when I travel with my laptop, which is rare, because I live and work in the same building. Suffice to say, my unlabeled canvas and leather Eddie Bauer messenger bag wasn’t going anywhere.

The two messenger bags I got for christmas are both canvas, unlabeled, and fit my motif - hipsterish, but sensible.  More function than form.  Understated, but once you’re in for a closer look, you fucking LIKE them.  The first was a smaller bag - a nice olive green, with a brown strap.  Nice matte metalwork, and exposed stitching.  It’s me.  I like it.  The second is the exact same model of Eddie Bauer canvas and leather messenger bag, down to the color and everything.  It’s slightly used.  It’s from the 90s.  It’s a replacement.  I love it.  I love them both, actually.  The smaller one (the first one) is going to be great for day trips into Manhattan, to go the Strand, and eyefuck the hell out of their reviewer copies section. The second one, the replacement, is everything I’ve been searching for.

When my wife gave it to me, she was so excited, because she knew it was what I was looking for.  Hell, I tweeted the @eddiebauer official Eddie Bauer twitter handle, with a twitpic of my bag.  I said, “I’ve had this for 5 years, and it’s getting threadbare - know where I can find a replacement?” In my mind, this meant, “Any idea where I can find the exact same one?  No, I mean, the exact same one?  No, I mean, can you magically make my same bag whole again?  Can you send the migrant illiterate Peruvian who was responsible for stitching canvas to leather at the woefully unsafe Eddie Bauer factory in Sri Lanka (how would a Peruvian get to Sri Lanka in a.. world?!) to my apartment in Montclair, NJ, to just… work her magic on a rented Singer and bring this marvel of hipster imagineering back to life?” I think they said, “Sure!  Give us a call at 1-800-BUY-SHIT”.  I wasn’t confident.  Life got in the way, and I never called.  I totally intended to.  I’m sort of ashamed that I didn’t. I mean, how much could I love this bag that has been with me nearly every day since Christmas Day 2005, if I wasn’t willing to pick up the phone and semi-anonymously call up to ask for the some indigent and likely elderly woman from Not-Here-istan to come patch up my baby?  Or, failing that, find that they had this supply closet full of these things for faux hipsters like me who just wanted the same damn thing over and over again because it hasn’t failed me yet!  

Well, I was busy.  

But, plus side, had I called, I would’ve gotten what my wife got, which was, “We don’t sell that one anymore, and we don’t know who would have it, but we totally have other bags that seem like they would be great, because we made that one, and we make other ones, and the common denominator here is we, so money you now us pay.”

So what does all this mean?  This all means that I’m sort of having a hard time letting go of my old bag.  I love my new bag.  I love it just as much as the old one, except, it doesn’t have that Hemingway damage to it.  What I mean is that quote about everywhere you go, and the damage you do by bringing along your instrument of record:

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.”

What that means to me is that there is importance in the things we use up.  We use up pen after pen after pen.  I buy the same pens all the time: Bic Atlantis.  I like black ink.  I use legal pads to sketch down my ideas.  I like my legal pads to be yellow.  I have weirdly specific preferences.because of this, I’m a real bitch to live with. But, I’m also nostalgic.  I used the messenger bag because it’s present as a thing I know I’ll have to surrender, because once I put everything in the new bag, there’s no point to keeping the old one.  I’ll never use it again.  But, I can’t throw it away.  I have to give it away.  It’s gotta carry on.  There’s no intrinsic reason for it.  The bag can’t feel things.  If it could, it’d still be pissed at me for all the awful things I called it when I dropped my old Powerbook out of it a few months after purchase.  I think I called it the C-Word.  I’m sorry I called it anything, especially since the whole thing was my fault.  Funny thing is, I cast off that powerbook in an instant for a newer model.  But, there’s no getting better than this current bag.  There’s just equalling perfection.  It also carries with it a sense of identity to me.  Everyone since my senior year at NYU, or, at least, the second half of my senior year at NYU, knows me and knows I carry this bag.  They’ve seen me put it on a seat rather than the floor.  They’ve watched me sling the strap over the back of whatever barstool I’m sitting on.  They’ve watched me dig through it and make my same, tired rip off of a Seinfeld joke from the Man-Purse episode (“I can never find anything in here…”), and give me a mercy fuck laugh. It’s not who I am, but it’s an identifying mark.

If I could, I would buy several of these bags to carry me through until I’m done using bags, except for the one into which I am peeing when I’m old.  It’s sort of like how Charles Schultz bought out all of the remaining stock of the pen he used to draw all of the Peanuts cartoons when he found out they were going out of business.  He had to have those pens. It was routine.  I get it.

Because of this, I don’t sell books.  I collect them.  I don’t throw away magazines easily, though I’m getting better.  Things where my teams, especially the Packers and Yankees are featured prominently on the cover for winning world championships, I keep.  I like the idea of one day having a library in my house.  Not a few bookshelves, mind you.  A fucking Scrooge McDuck library with the ladder that you push around, and the rich mahogany shelves.  And all the books will be creased and cracked at the spine, because there will only be one rule for books in my library: my wife or I will have to have read them.  Sure, I’ll have a bookshelf somewhere that has the “books we want to read soon” collection on them, but the books we have read - they’ll go in the library.

I like showing off my books. My grad assistant came in to my apartment last week and looked at my books.  He perused a few of them and asked who’s were who’s - mine or my wife’s. He poked around a bit, and mentioned that I have lots of books. This does two things for me.  One, it makes me feel semi-intelligent.  Two, it gives people a window to my soul.  Yes, I have a copy of “I hope they serve beer in hell.”  I also have books about traffic patterns (dude, can we PLEASE get traffic circles in this country?! They are the way of the future!), the history of Coca-Cola, the LA Comedy Strike in the 1970s, a shitload of Hemingway, something about the Financial Crisis of 2008, and a whole lot of analysis of Springsteen.  I want to know.  That’s the whole sentence.  There’s so much to know out there.  I have books about Mormonism, about political religion, about the fleecing of the evangelical vote.  I have books about Zombies. Shit, have you ever read “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle?”  Do you like Hamlet… and awesomeness?  Read it!  All of these things are a way to say that I like people to know me without asking me.  Look at my books and understand what I like.  Is that too much to ask?

I know where all of this comes from, too.  It comes from my dad.  He saves everything.  My mom rips things in half and throws them away.  Seriously.  My mom tears everything up that she throws out.  I think, subconsciously, she does it so she can’t have second thoughts and go picking through the trash.  I’ve seen my mom tear up post-it notes.  No, seriously.  My dad, on the other hand, keeps stacks of magazines.  He has old issues of Car and Driver, and Road and Track, and National Geographic bound with twine up in the attic of my parents’ house.  It’s not like they are hermetically sealed, or that he’s going to need them some day.  He just has them.  He couldn’t bring himself to throw that stuff away.  It’s like Frank Costanza collecting old issues of TV Guide.  I was once snooping through my parents room, bored out of my mind.  I found a few things that were interesting:

- a white garbage bag full of Bermudan pennies (my dad once was a Naval Aviator, so he went to Bermuda regularly)

- my dad’s Walther PPK.  That’s a handgun.  That’s the gun that James Bond used.  My dad also kept/keeps it in his bedroom in case of a break in.  My parents live in a town of 460 people (and shrinking).  Suffice to say, my dad and Charlton Heston would’ve gotten along just fine.  Also, despite what the TV says, I did not smoke pot with a friend and then accidentally shoot him.  I was alone at the time, and nine.  And pot-less.  Also, that TV ad is total bullshit.  What’s the bigger enemy there? Unlocked handguns, negligent parents, or some kush? Only would the marijuana-phobic United States look at a scene where two pre-teens have access to a loaded, unlocked weapon, smoke some pot, and the gun accidentally goes off, and think that pot was the true problem here. Fuck the partnership for a drug free America.  How about a partnership for less bullshit ads on TV in America?

-The Watertown Daily Times from the day the United States invaded Iraq during Operation: Desert Storm.  I later asked my dad about this (and not about his weapon, which I remember being too scared to do more than touch - I just assumed that I would accidentally shoot myself.  It made me so anxious and scared that I had to smoke some pot just to calm my nerves.  Thanks, partnership for a drug free America!  You saved my life that day!) and he said, “Well, it’s not every day the country goes to war.”

I thought about that, and, while I knew that no one would ever be clamoring for an original printing of the Watertown Daily Times, a right wing rag from Northern New York, from the day the US invaded Iraq, I just sort of thought “Totally valid.  A temporal marker.”  It’s sort of like those ransom photos of people holding up the day’s newspaper like in “Proof of Life” (totally underrated, by the way!) - I would just want to know what people were saying before we knew what we know now.  Also, what was life like then?  What was on TV that night?  What was going on in Sports?  I guess, now, with the internet, those things are easier to find out.  But, the fact remains - I have a level of nostalgia for things, especially things like my old messenger bag.  I could lie and tell you I have a bunch of stories about things that have happened to it, but I don’t.  I just know that, like a faithful companion, it’s seen me through from Senior year of school to my first Christmas as a married man.

I will give it away, either to charity, or to someone who just really wants a beat up old messenger bag with an ink stain on the inside and the styrofoam padding extruding from the tears in the worn canvas, and promises to treat it the way I did.  In 2017, when this new bag is borderline kaputsky, I am hopeful I’ll be able to find something similar, or the same thing, though I doubt it.  I’ll have to move on, and maybe find one that can better personify me.  Until then, however, I will create new stories and memories with this one, wear at the fabric, scuff the leather, and strain its stitching. It’s time to blunt this instrument.