Jake Basile Dot Com

As of the timestamp on this article, I am 38 years old. Of the few people that read this, some will think I’m old as dirt while others will think I’m way too young to be writing an article like this. Neither of these groups are fully correct but it’s my site and I get to choose what to put on it.

When I was growing up I always wanted to be older. I am the youngest in my immediate family, separated from my brother by 17 years. My parents had me later than most and I hated being “just a kid”. It’s even the reason I changed my name: I thought that the last syllable in “Jacob” sounded like “cub” as in a baby animal. I felt I was smarter and more mature than the kids my age since I was so comfortable around people older than myself, so why did I have to go through all this trouble of growing up and being a stupid kid when I could just be an adult?

I remember picking up paper credit card applications from the grocery store and filling them out a few times. I was very upset when American Express rejected me for being under 18. I wanted a checking account so badly. I would ask my grandmother to let me fill out her bill payment checks just to imagine it was me. The checking account obsession lasted into adulthood and now I kind of collect them as I have about six. Once, I filled out some form I picked up when I went to a trade show with my father - I even made up a fictional company “XJ Enterprises”. I ended up with a “free” subscription to The Fabricator Magazine, unaware of the irony in the name. I even got a phone call, answered by my grandmother, looking for the President of XJ Enterprises. She informed the salesman that she was my secretary but I was only 12 (or whatever age I was) at the time. He told her to have me give him a call when I was looking for a job, but I never did.

As I get older, I find I wish I was younger. I fall victim to nostalgia-bait in my social feeds, showing me games, videos, and images from the 90s that I remember. Even the especially egregious “narrative” ones e.g. “It’s summer. You are at a friends house. It’s raining outside and his mom got you pizza. You’re playing Metal Gear Solid.” These feel especially manipulative and I try my best to avoid them. Sometimes I even find myself pining for school days, which were not great for me objectively - the fat nerdy kid isn’t gonna be popular. So maybe that’s all this is, the illusion of what life was a kid that I miss. Or maybe it’s just my desire for a simpler stage in life when I didn’t have to worry so much about everything: job, house, wife, health, money, retirement (ha!), RSI, investments, insurance, credit scores.

Mostly though, I think what I miss the most is the time in between. Everyone older than a kid to whom I’ve spoken about this agrees - time really seems to pass faster as you get older. I can clearly remember many events of my childhood and adolescence, and many recent events, but the time in between is mostly a blur with a few points of definition here and there, and as I get older that blur will only get wider. But I know that as I was living that blur there were other very important things I was concerned about or working on whether homework or a project for work with a deadline. Maybe that goes to show that not all the things that worry us in the moment are really that momentous after all since not all of them get filed away in the neurons.

Of course there are some events that really do matter, and that I wish I’d known were more important at the time. As they say, you don’t know the good times when you’re in them. I wish I’d known how important spending time at my dad’s shop would be. If I would have known, I’d have paid more attention to him teaching me about electronics and soldering and how to fix things! I would’ve spent more time in the kitchen with my grandmother learning her recipes. I only started cooking for real in the past few years and could’ve been doing that for much longer. I would’ve kept my first digital camera and I would’ve kept the photos from it - I’ve lost them all over the years as I never felt I was good enough to keep taking photos and keep the photos themselves.

But what is in the past is in the past, and cannot be changed. I still feel a bit bad that most of my life has been that “blur”, nothing notable enough to be worth spending neurons to remember while also spending so much time during that blur worrying about things that aren’t worth remembering. Maybe when I’m old enough I’ll figure out how to even things out and worry about the things I will remember. In the meantime, I’ll try to create more moments worth remembering – and hopefully worry a little less about the rest.