Oh Dave! Now

In my desk drawer at work I keep a bag of Dove individually-wrapped “silky smooth dark chocolate Promises” and help myself to two or three or four for an afternoon pick-me-up. On the inside of the wrappers are printed words of wisdom submitted by people from around the country (click here if you want to submit your own). One platitude I’ve unwrapped repeatedly is “Keep moving forward; don’t look back” from Sally in Griffith, Indiana. I wish I could, Sally, but thanks to you I keep having these déjà vu moments.

Sally was probably mimicking and referencing Bob Dylan’s philosophy (or was it Boston’s?) from the 1967 concert tour documentary “Dont Look Back.” Of course, Bob now hosts the “Theme Time Radio” program on Sirius/XM satellite radio in which he plays and comments on old, old songs. Yesterday it was songs about places around the world and he played a catchy ditty from 1953 by the Four Lads called “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”:

Take me back to Constantinople
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks’

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it, I can’t say
(People just liked it better that way)

So I can’t look to Bob Dylan as a role model for not looking back. Therapists, at their own expense, have also told me to stop dwelling on the past and look to the future. So to avoid turning into a pillar of freshly ground sea salt, let me predict that Lady Gaga will advise in 2011 to:

Turn on the lights, baby
The sun is arised, hey ee
Time to pee, you see
And flee, woo wee.
P-p-p-p-pee
Fl-fl-fl-fl-flee

By the time you read this, I’ll be onto something else but if you comment on it, then I have to stop moving forward and think about what I wrote in the past in order to respond. It’s a dilemma, this philosophy of looking to the future and not living in the past. My literalist nature and unflailing commitment to my choices entails that I take everything to the extreme. My “Oh Dave Now’ entries have been in most cases my memoirs. Not today, my friends, today is about tomorrow.

But first I need to turn my back on the past which contains a whole lot of history. On the global level there are scores of ancient buildings, books, lives long gone that I will shun.  Bye bye, Bible, Koran, Dead Sea Schrolls. There will be no point in visiting dusty museums filled with the likes of Picasso, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. I won’t be reading any more of my favorite plays by Shakespeare or George Bernard Shaw, for starters. It can be argued that as long as I see a live performance of their masterpieces, then I’m living in the present and looking forward. But their language is so not hip and modern that within five minutes I’ll feel like I’ve traveled back in time (not to mention the memories they’ll conjure).

On a personal level I’ll want to start by cleaning out my closet and buying all new clothes, a simple act that will snowball by stimulating the economy and creating a new era of prosperity. My new duds will attract new, fashion-forward friends who will hang on my every word as they admire my crisp, fresh designer knockoffs from Marshalls and Ross. I will never set foot in a Goodwill or Salvation Army again except to unload my old crap.

Last year I started a photo album project of indexing piles of old photos that went back to grade school. I selectively started laying them out chronologically in several albums. Into the trash bin! There haven’t been enough rainy days to work on them anyway. In the future I won’t be writing (or reading) any holiday letters that regurgitate the past year’s highlights. No more reading buried Facebook news feeds over a day old.

I have hundreds of music CDs and a collection of over 165 movie DVDs, all of which I can load into bags and sell at Berkeley’s Amoeba Records that they can then resell as used to people who live in the past. I only bought DVDs of movies I had already seen more than once because I knew I would want to see them again. But they’re old movies! With dead actors! Zzzzzz. I’ll need to remove Turner Classic Movies from my favorite channels menu, along with TV Land. You were funny in your time, Lucy, but you are old, old news. “The Golden Girls” are dead to me.

No more recorded music, movies, TV. If I’m going to be serious about looking forward, I will only permit live performances into my life. If a band covers an old song by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, I will walk right out of that club and find musicians who only compose and perform new music.

When the HR department tells me it’s time for my annual performance evaluation, I will only fill out the questions about my future goals and where I see myself in 3-5 years. It’s pointless to evaluate and rate what I did in the past, not only my successes but also my screwups. It’s the achievements and screwups in the future that matter. Reward me—or don’t—for those!

I believe in paying taxes to support the future of our country and community, but don’t ask me to look back at what I earned and spent in the past. I’ll budget out what I can afford and pay it in monthly installments from my paycheck and the IRS can take it or leave it.

This is going to be very liberating, I can see that. Everything in my life will be new—new challenges, new discoveries, new products, new experiences. It’s exciting! Sure, there may be boredom, sadness, frustration, and disappointment too, but those will be replaced soon enough as I move forward. As long as I don’t look too far into the unpredictable but ultimately inevitable future, I won’t freak out and be frozen by fear.

So let’s end this session and go out and see what’s next in our lives, both online and offline. Thanks for reading as I take this new direction. I’ll see you in the future and soon forget that this ever happened. Sorry if there were typos or grammatical mistakes this week, but I didn’t go back to proofread.