🎶 and the ghost of the boulevard littered with lonely hearts the city like a graveyard once was a postcard when you lose your wonder and you can't remember when we were living in the days of thunder in the days of thunder 🎶
I've maybe mentioned this song by The Midnight before, on Twitter if not here; it's a favorite. but it's occurred to me that its mood isn't really appropriate to today's occasions.
the songs I know best from The Midnight tend to be suffused with heavy 1980s-tinged nostalgia; they're songs about people with regrets, looking backwards on days of youthful energy and daring. the very name "Days of Thunder", on a song released in 2014, looks backward towards Tony Scott's "Days of Thunder" and years of exciting Tom Cruise action movies. "the days of thunder" were long ago, right? a faded memory. now we're living in colder greyer times...right?
we're getting old; fifty is fast approaching. there's wrinkles and veins and liver spots on our hands, grey streaks in our hair; we tire easily and prefer to be sitting down most days. we look back on memories of youthful optimism frittered away, broken and betrayed dreams, shattered relationships; we used to think, like lots of middle-aged people do, like we'd peaked early and blown our big chances.
not any more, though. not really.
"the days of thunder" might have once seemed like they were in the past. now I don't think that. they're now—right now, these years we're now living through, are the "days of thunder". the "Great Years", to use the memorable phrase that Tolkien used to describe the years of the great crisis of the Third Age, when moment events crowded up against each other day after day, while Sauron finally attempted to assert himself, but was defeated. we're living through that NOW.
these are our "Great Years".
we should avoid the temptation of nostalgia. I'm not saying that we should simply forget the past, but we should learn from it and thence learn to avoid its mistakes, rather than looking forever backwards, wallowing in a fog of regret for a time when things were (supposedly) happier and full of promise, trapped in fruitless mimicry of vanished old times that maybe never existed.
the time is now. welcome to the days of thunder.
~Chara of Pnictogen