Back, to the Future

It's funny how our surroundings can have such an impact on our inward feelings.

Starting blogs is hard. My blogs are always too long. I'm going to write this whole thing in 15 minutes so it doesn't get too long. Ready, go.

Today is April 13th, 2006. The weather is pretty typical for Spring in Utah. It smells exactly like spring ought to. In the end, it's spring, and the weather is gorgeous. It's not perfect frisbee conditions, but it's still amazing weather.

My feelings are directly tied to the weather. I mean, I'm almost always happy, but the things I want to do are tied to the weather. They say that smell is the strongest sense tied to memory, and I suppose that's true. Weather is tied to my memory a ton, especially the way that the weather smells.

Today has a very unique smell.

Last year about this time, life wasn't so great. Lets face it, things sorta sucked. I'm pretty sure I missed all of spring last year. It's just not there.

That means when I go outside these days, I'm taken back to the past. Not to last year, but to the last time that I really stopped to notice the weather, the end of 8th grade.

You have no idea what sort of impact this is having on me. Everything about me is yearning to go back to April 2004. All I want to do is capture the flag. Welling up from deep within me is the primordal urge to run, dodge, hurdle, and then grab the bandana and book it. It's an undeniable force. It's just what I want to do.

Spring 2004, here's to you. I long to be there. Before I had to worry about stuff. Back in the day when night games meant playing games outside at night. It didn't mean watching a movie, it didn't mean playing catchphrase again. It was exactly what it said. Sometimes I forgot my belt and we had to play halo, and sometimes we had to play a little DDR, but in the end it was good times.

It was the future. It was really the first time I had ever started hanging out with girls outside of school. It was when we started growing up. We were growing up, but not changing. Now everything has changed, everybody has changed. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but things are different now. They're not so innocent. Back in the day, it was me and my boys for life. It was always gonna be that way, things were always gonna be great.

Now, maybe things are great, maybe they're not, nobody knows for sure. The real thing though, is that they're not the way I thought they'd be. They're not the way anybody thought they'd be I think. Back in the day, we got a glimpse of what the future could be like. Well, the future is now an alternate, and it's a good alternate, but I can't help wanting to be back, back when the air was clean, the grass was green, and the flag was within my reach.

I know I can't really go back, but my subconcious really wants to. I find myself sitting here, looking at the messenger window, waiting for all my good friends from 2 years ago to get online. It takes a while to remember that I'm 730 days too late.

The weather takes me back to a more innocent time. A peaceful time. I know that life wasn't perfect, and it wasn't any better than it is now. But ya know, just for today, I want to go back.

Here's to you, timeline at the dollar theaters. Here's to you, capture the flag in that circle over there. Here's to you, DDR in robert's basement, and here's to you, my perpetually lost belt. You've served your country well.