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The Ghosts of Imagined Futures Past
On regression, self-mythology, unfulfilled promises, and learning to let it all go.
I never moved to Lisbon. I don’t suppose you thought I did, but I got really close. I had to cancel a flight and thus a house-hunt, slated for March 5–14, 2020; I don’t need to tell you why. You were alive on Earth back then. You know what happened.
The past three years were anything but kind to anyone, and thus a grown-ass man waxing on about a dream that died in the covid cauldron, when we all lost so much worse — not the least of which the last flickering of collective quasi-blissful naivete that we could go on living like this and things would work themselves out (but more importantly millions of lives) — reads like your least favorite mope-core indie flick. I will still do it, briefly anyway, because there’s a lesson here, or a catharsis, of sorts, anyway.
Back then, the running narrative in my life was: dude lives in a rented car in a Walmart parking lot, finds salvation at a corporate copywriting job, rides that gig’s stability plus his gift of gab and musical side-hustle to a seven-year bull market that saw his net-worth flip from deep in the red to deep in the black, climbs the social ladder, becomes a community pillar, climbs out of a dark anxious depression, watches his words travel…
