Firsts

It was the mid-1990s. I walked into the record store (aptly-named Record Service), and took stock of where I was. It was situated in an old building on Green St., in campustown. The immediate thought I have when remembering it is 'brown.' I remember the walls as being brown, the shelves were brown, it was just... brown. It felt cozy. There was a sign on one of the walls for a place upstairs called Figaro's. It specialized in classical music. My heart fluttered slightly, as I was partial to classical music, and so seeing that there was some place devoted to it seemed pretty awesome. But, I didn't go there, as I wanted to primarily focus attention on what was on offer at the main record store. It was my first time in that shop. I was familiar with classical music. I was not, it turned out, familiar with what a lot of what Record Service had to offer.

There was so much to take in. A few items I remember that stood out were: the greatest hits collection (the best of) New Order; a CD single by Pizzicato Five called Happy Sad. The cover caught my attention, both because of its composition, and because I thought I clocked a gay guy on it (I was right). Having not been out for a terribly long time, it felt reassuring to be in a place that sold a CD with a gay man on the cover. That may sound odd now, but then? It meant a lot. And of course there was the Future Sound of London's (FSOL) two-disc alum Lifeforms. The cover alone made it worth buying, and the fact that it had tracks titled Ill Flower, Spineless Jelly, and Omnipresence only made me more intrigued. Once purchased, I took it home, anxious to listen!

During a trip to New York City with a friend in 1995, we stopped at one of those anonymous-though-ubiquitous narrow shops in Queens that sold sundry items, and on a whim I bought a rotating disco ball. You know, one of those black balls with round, slightly protruding pieces of glass plastic that were different colors. When you turned it on, it began to rotate, and the light inside caused different colors to be splayed across the walls and ceiling of whatever room it was in. It broke after a couple months, but it worked long enough for me to enjoy it.

More than once I would turn the lights off in my bedroom, turn on the disco ball, play Lifeforms, and just lay on the bed, thinking. The album was very ambient and quite chill. It was excellent material to just let yourself drift away in your thoughts to. I kind of miss those days. The time before smartphones forbade us from having moments where we occupied ourselves with something other than a screen in our hand. We could sometimes just be with our thoughts, give our brains time to think about things. David Lynch once talked about how important daydreaming was to him. Indeed, it can sometimes be a springboard for our creativity. That's something I fear we've lost in the current age of constant bombardment of screens to occupy our minds.

But I digress.

The point of telling you about my adventures at Record Service, of visiting NYC, and of laying on my bed listening to ambient music is to say that those were all firsts for me. They were new experiences. Sure, as a kid during the 1980s I'd had plenty of new experiences. Everything is new for a young human being gaining awareness of the world around them. But the 1990s were a time that ushered-in so much for me that had previously been unexplored. I became an adult. I had sex for the first time. I discovered synthpop. I went to C-Street in Champaign -- Roscoe's, Sidetracks and Berlin in Chicago, and was introduced to the world of club music. I fell in love for the first time. I learned what it was like to have a job and earn a living. I went to college. I lived on my own. I discovered the aforementioned joy of going to record stores and listening to new music that blew mind (like, I'd never even heard of ambient music before FSOL's Lifeforms). I traveled to places like California and New York City. I experienced Pride parades for the first time. I went to the Illinois State University campus with some lesbian friends, and we saw the all-male, pro-gay acapella group The Flirtations. Hadn't done anything like that before. And, on a somber note, I experienced the deaths of my cousin Tyrone, uncle Joe, father and maternal grandmother, so it was a new experience to feel the loss of those who I'd been close with, or who'd been a part of my life up to that point.

All of the aforementioned things occurred during the 1990s. It was a whirlwind of a decade for yours truly. So many new avenues of exploration. Not that 2000 to the present has been devoid of new experiences. I've discovered what it's like to have a romantic relationship, and I've done some traveling - most excitingly having gone abroad for the time, to England in 2022.

And yet... I dunno, it just seems like so many of the new-to-me life experiences are fewer and farther between now. Oddly, this is something that hadn't occurred to me until recently, and I'm not sure how accurate an observation it is (the brain can be tricky when it comes to how it interprets things). But, for the sake of argument, let's say that bulk of new experiences are behind me. That's kind of depressing, but it also helps explain the old adage about how time seems to move faster as we get older. As a 2024 article from Psychology Today points out:

"Time speeds up with increasing age because we have fewer new experiences and our perception is less vivid."

So, there you have it. And, it'll only get faster from here on out, with a few exceptions. For example, the two weeks I spent in England did not go by quickly. They felt a like nice, long two weeks. Perhaps the slowest time has felt in a long time? And it was wonderful. What made it different from the rest of my life? A lot of firsts. The first time I'd flown internationally. The first time I'd been to England, where I had new-to-me experiences like visiting London and Oxford, and seeing so many of their sights. I am unlikely to have too many more such experiences. That's okay. Some folks never even get to do something like that even once. I've been fortunate to have so much exposure to so many positive things over the years.

But I do miss the '90s sometimes.