A vacuole is a type of biological mass…sort of like a self-contained organism…a cell, or amoeba, or something like that. Something small, wet, and jiggly.
I once read an old space western in which time vacuoles existed (the book was Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman for those curious…I highly recommend it) and I'm pretty sure that they actually do exist. In the symbolic sense, of course.
1982 was a special time for vacuoles to form. Rifts in the grid of the space-time-matter-continuum, permanently stuck in 1982. These include a few places in the far reaches of the American Southwest, a few small villages in Eastern Europe, the entire state of Alabama, and a few specific nooks scattered across the rest of the world.
Last year I found one of these '82 time vacuoles in the basement of an old house in South Charlotte. For a nightmarish 7 weeks I lived in 1982. I'm fine with basements in general, but this one was nightmarishly 1982. It smelled of old clothes and mildew, and there were hardly any windows, and there was moldy yellow carpet and moldy wooden paneling and spiders and roaches and silverfish. The water heater did not work for the first three weeks, so I would wake up in the dark and stumble into the bathroom, turn on the shower, try to wash all the spiders down the drain, and jump into the frigid cold water, and then I would book my tail out of that place while I could, and I'd wait until as late as possible before I came back to it, preferably after nightfall so the darkness-during-daytime didn't bother me too much. When it rained it would pour, and once in the middle of the night when the landlords were in Tennessee for a week I woke with a literal scream because it was storming outside and the ceiling decided to dump gallons of water all over me and my bed, and I tried to grab towels and t-shirts and stuff them into the corners to stave off the water, and finally I had to run upstairs and stuff more towels into the threshold of a sliding door above my room, and I spent the rest of the night avoiding the drips and listening to water rush down inside the walls all around me. I didn't even unload all of my belongings from my car. I only brought in what was absolutely necessary to survive, like shampoo, deodorant, shoes, and my guitars. I drove around for months with my coats, tools, books, and electric piano still in my trunk, where they had a much better life.
This was not a place of Molly Ringwald starring in John Hughes films, or Ferrari Testarossas driving through Chicago.
This was a place of polyester jackets and light blue jeans and the Chevrolet Celebrity and Birmingham, Alabama.
Sometimes I worry about 2042, three decades into the future. Think about it. There will be 2012 vacuoles. There will be Justin Bieber, Hyundais, Snuggies, North Face, and Jersey Shore. Yes, of course in this 2012 vacuole there will also be good things like Zooey Deschanel, Porsches, Polo Ralph Lauren, and The Walking Dead. But still.
Biebs? Snooki? Party Rock Anthem? Pumped Up Kicks? America in general?
We'll have to answer for this.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2012 at 12:41am and is filed under Essays, Too Long For Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
