Nostalgia
Kor
Originally uploaded by robduf. It’s been a long time for me, I won’t go into everything that I have been doing, because there is so much and then again, so little that I have been doing. It’s just me living my life with my family and working in a job that I love to this day even if I bitch from time to time.
What got me to write today was about my past more than my future.
You see in Alaska it was my close group of friends that got me through my childhood. I was never the popular kid there and I always felt on the outside in most all situations. People like Ruben, who was like my twin brother. And Ryan, while popular always found the time to be nice to me and we became close...my god given brother. From him I met people like Ian and Scott that accepted me as well, even as the poor kid that lived down in the trailer park.
In this time together we all had something close in common, art, and with that came our love for Japanese Animation. They were on the cutting edge of animation in that time and some can argue that they still are there. Our work with the fan clubs and fan subbing was fun and we really were some of the first to work in such things. Now you can just log into torrent sites and find about everything release in Japan fan subbed.
To think of the lengths we had to go to in the late 80s and early 90s...It makes me laugh now.
While we of us had our favorite Anime of the time I think the one that’s stuck to me the most was Kimagure Orange Road (KOR). It was a powerful series that still sits as one of the keystones for relationship based Manga and Anime even today. Yesterday I caught myself talking about it with Joe in some detail and I thought, how interesting that my past meets my future.
Joe has never been a big fan of Anime or cartoons at all really, but it’s fun to watch him humor me and I think he finds little things that he can enjoy from them, that means a lot to me as well.
Over the last month I’ve been working to get the English translated KOR on my Sony reader so that I could read all 18 manga cover to cover. I was the first time that I’ve ever really taken a good hard look at the manga as most of my obsession has focused to the Anime. I truly enjoyed the Manga and found that the added depth of some of the minor characters from the Anime was touching. Also to see some of the smaller stories that didn’t find their way to the animation was like finding a little piece of candy you thought you had missed in the box.
Someone said “Those that don’t learn the past are doomed to repeat it.” I say “Those that keep living in the past will never move forward.”
Because of my sudden found nostalgia with KOR, I’ve found myself looking at old collectables, posters, VHS tapes, Lasers Disks. In my hunt, I found two posters that I think I’ll get framed to remind me always of my childhood, my close friends, and what fun I had never knowing it.
I will keep moving forward, but I will never forget my precious, precious past…