Digital Memories: October 25, 1991
Story of two clowns.
Memories. It is funny what that word can bring to you. I know what memories first come to mind when I hear that word. There is the first date with my wife, where we walked around Lincoln after coffee, or seeing the Sacré-Cœur after getting out of the tunnel in Paris. There are many other moments, too, and I know that as I grow older, those memories will continue to grow.
Most of these memories play back in my mind like a VCR tape would in the day. Which brings me to this incredible week, when I received the first shipment of digitized tapes.
Digitizing has been one of my main goals since 2016. I started with the photo albums, using an Epson V600 to scan hundreds of photographs. While I didn’t always have time to scan, it took roughly four years to complete that process. Then came the 35mm negatives, which I started in 2024. It wasn’t until the end of spring this year that I was able to properly archive all of those. And both of those processes brought back many amazing memories. But photographs can only tell so much of the story.
Recently, I received some of the VCR tapes my grandparents had after my grandmother passed away. I had other VCR tapes sitting around that I needed to digitize as well, but I decided to start with the ones I had received from my grandmother. After about a six-week wait from the time I placed the order, I received the digital copies of the 12 tapes.
Unfortunately, two of the tapes were completely VCR recordings of movies and news from those time periods. Three more were half memories, half recordings of things on the telly. Which feels right for the VCR era. One minute you are watching a treasured family moment, and the next you are watching a weather report from 1992 as if it were part of the family archive.
Each tape also had many memories that needed to be split out, including some that will never be shown. Apparently, parents in the late 80s and early 90s loved to videotape their children being bathed, from the day they were born through the day they could start showering on their own. This was apparently normal. We survived, but only just.
As of today, I have four of the videotapes broken out and posted the videos on YouTube to share. Of course, I will not release them all at once, and I have decided that using my Substack would be an appropriate place to share these memories. While I know the audience is small, maybe these posts will be appreciated one day. Or, at the very least, they will confuse a future archivist.
The first memory I would like to share is from October 11, 1991. It is a short clip, only around three and a half minutes. It features both my brother Mark and me as we put on our Halloween costumes. It is mentioned that it is actually the first time I have dressed up for Halloween, as I find people wearing masks scary.
There are a lot of emotions that come when watching these old videos. If you do not get emotional watching the small person you used to be, then there should be questions. It isn’t that I want to be that person again, but it is interesting to see the person I was. Because all throughout our lives, we are different people. I am not the same person I was when I was three, nor the same person I was at 10 or 26, or even today. I have always believed that a person should never stop learning, never stop evolving in life. If I were the same person I was when I came out of high school, I would very much want to question myself. Preferably in writing.
But another part of these memories was seeing family life. It is interesting how families functioned before your crazy parents and uncles decided that a man who wears more makeup than a regional theatre production of Cats was more believable than their own children. It is that same family member who says politics shouldn’t come between family, but then continues to support someone who wants to tear their family apart. It is hard to reconcile.
Truthfully, as I am about to become a parent, I know this much: I would never support a clown over my own child. Not even a very convincing clown. Not even one with a flag behind him and a poorly fitted suit.
It is crazy to think how much one man can divide families. And let’s not forget, this is a man who is a convicted felon, has bankrupted multiple businesses, and tells so many lies that if I had a nickel for each one, I would probably be a trillionaire at this point. He has also said things about his own daughter that should make any decent person quietly leave the room and not come back.
It is sad watching these videos, realizing that those family moments will never happen again. And I am not sorry for it. I cannot love someone who supports someone who wants to tear my family apart. If they want to say they didn’t know how crazy he was, they shouldn’t support someone without doing their research. He was telling everyone exactly who he was for years. Subtlety was never his burden.
But this is part of a broader subject. Political parties are toxic. They allow people to be ignorant and support people without having to do the work. People are so brainwashed in America that they do not seem to care if it means cutting their children out of their lives to support a clown.
I mean, I was three, in that clown outfit, and I had more intelligence than the current President. That is not a sentence I expected to write in a reflection on childhood memories, but history has been very inconsiderate lately. And while some are reading this as if I’m only against Republicans, I’m not. Democrats are not innocent in this either.
George Washington, in his farewell speech, spoke out against political parties. And I am a firm believer that these parties are America’s downfall. Both of these parties are run by huge donors, who will keep us separate as they steal all the public goods. And for those who do not know what a public good is, it is a good for all of America to enjoy, not for the rich to own, poison, package, and sell back to us with a subscription fee. Just the other day, the current administration rolled back water safety standards, just to ensure that us 99% could have a higher risk of cancer. So yay, that was a win for America. Nothing says greatness quite like a glass of tap water with a warning label.
What a joke.
So I will look back at myself dressing as a clown, not knowing I was really dressing as the future President, all those years ago. And you know what? I am still a person afraid of masks, because I do not know what the clown with a mask full of orange makeup will do next.