Posted by I woke up at 4AM feeling what I could only describe as sad for the passage of time.
I think I had a dream about my old house, or how it smelled. What a particular aspect of it looked like up close. Something like that.
The song “They Don’t Know” by Tracy Ullman was also stuck in my head. Since I couldn’t listen to it in bed, I looked it up on Wikipedia. I was aware Tracy Ullman hadn’t written it, but for the longest time I thought it was written by Prince, only to learn it was actually written by Kirsty MacColl. Weird! So what happened was Tracy Ullman, who was a UK comedy celebrity at the time, covered it in 1984. It became a hit, which resulted in her getting a spot on US MTV.
So now it’s 4 AM and I have this cool story in my head about how the late Kirsty MacColl, famous singer/songwriter, and onetime backup singer for The Smiths, is indirectly responsible for The Simpsons (and, depending on who you’re talking with, predicted the Trump presidency). And then I realized the awful truth:
I knew all of this already.
All of it.
This was all just me—from the 1980s, who saw Red Dawn on VHS and Star Wars IV in the movie theater—getting older. Re-learning things I already knew at 4 in the morning.
And I know now that this is what it means to feel sad about time.