Prologue: Living in 1996

It is a silly and arbitrary thing to do and that is exactly why I have decided to do it.

It all started when I got one of those really powerful ideas born from an immensely depressing stint of holiday break boredom. One of those rush of adrenaline ideas that grip your brain with the might of a caber-tosser and refuses to let go no matter how much reasoning you throw at it. One of those ideas so deep from the bowels of boredom that it consumes all of your other basic desires for food, sleep, and sex. A life-impacting idea was bound to wrestle itself into existence over the course of 2020’s winter holiday break where I was without the rigors of suiting up for work for an entire two weeks. Not that suiting up for work had been a real thing for months because of the pandemic unless you count sliding on sweatpants and a collared shirt to look presentable on Zoom as “suiting up”. So, yeah, I didn’t have to do that for a little while which freed my time and mind perhaps a little too much. This super-duper pervading bored idea was the belief I could participate in time travel if I was willing to dedicate myself to it. Not real time travel, no. I’m not Doc Brown, I don’t have a DeLorean, and I’m not being chased by the Libyans. You know? REAL time travel. What I mean is “willful time travel.”

I want to travel back to lunch.

Willful time travel, or WTT, boils down to simply choosing to only consume or participate in “things” from a specific different time. My arbitrary WTT rules stop at entertainment. I’m not going to be eating any MREs or using a dial-up modem to access Yahoo or Ask Jeeves. I don’t own even own a VCR. Going that far with this doesn’t appeal to me at all. I just want to engulf myself in the entertainment provided in a single previous year. Media including books, movies, TV shows, video games, and news clips are all fair game. Does that mean I ignore all of the daily BREAKING NEWS updates my phone gives me on an hourly basis? Weird how daily news is minute-to-minute now. But the answer is no. I do not wish to detach from reality and I do not intend to be puritanical about any of this. It is an experiment and it is for fun. Mostly.

I do yearn for that ever elusive Amish paradise, though. Huge butter fan here.

It would seem that every project I have ever undertaken has had the goal of immersing me into a past time. Playing “retro” video games, watching “old school” wrestling, listening to grunge music from the 90’s, and growing a mullet all indicate that I am less at-home here in the current and look more longingly toward a time that has passed. Why is that? I am not sure. My best guess is that I grew up knowingly sheltered from having things I thought looked fun or interesting; things that I am able to enjoy now with my adult money. I never stopped wanting to experience those things. I reckon my quest from childhood was to experience everything right then. Not right now. Right then! Now, thanks to technology and the ubiquity of internet services, sometimes pirating services, and once again my wallet, I am able to collect and consume all of the things I was starved of then, for better or worse. 

I could just do that. I could just watch, listen, read, or play whatever from a past time that I wanted and that would be fine. I could listen to Aerosmith’s 1993 Get A Grip, play 1996’s Mario 64, read 1997’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and watch 1994’s Dumb & Dumber all in one day! For free! And that’s great. But enjoying the things from a different time is arguably not the same as enjoying that time or as living in it and seeing it as it was then. What is the context of these things as they were? I realize it is impossible to wipe my senses clean of the experiences they have endured over time and my reference for judging entertainment of a by-gone period comes from a brain trained and molded by a different era.  For example, I now know J.K. Rowling has become nothing more than a cash-grabbing pot-stirrer and it’s now even more difficult to enjoy her writing today versus then. I also listened to Aerosmith’s Livin’ on the Edge way too much as a teenager and the thought of that song now makes me delirious despite loving it when it was new. Going back in time with fresh eyes and ears is out of the question but I’m not doing this to review or judge anything - just to live alongside it.

“Hun! Come look at this obviously legit Aerosmith touring van… aaaaaand I’m trafficked.”

Where will I go? Thanks to listeners of the Polykill Podcast, or at least those who follow the Twitter account or those who follow accounts who retweeted the poll, the masses have selected that I be sent back to the year 1996. Starting February 1st, 2021 I will be committed to watching movies and TV shows, reading books, playing video games, and otherwise living the life of someone who loved to be entertained in 1996. That means things that were released in 1996 and not before. Sure, things from 1994 and 1995 existed in 1996 but the point of the exercise is to appreciate the context of the “now” of the “then”. I’m focused entirely on 1996. On March 1st, 2021 I will return to the present day, which is currently a future day. Back to the future. 

One other caveat I am declaring is that I will not be replaying video games or re-watching movies I have already experienced just because they’re noteworthy, although re-listening to some of the music I will deem acceptable, if not outright necessary. I might watch some gameplay on a few of the notable games just to recalibrate my brain a little or watch a breakdown of a few films from then, but a month to take in 1996 isn’t really a ton of time given that I have a full-time job, wife, and kid that all require my 2021 attention so I get to be as selective as I can be.

Each day here I will chronicle the experiences of the day-to-day of this endeavor. I hope you enjoy this as much as I hope I will.