The Odorous Metaphor-Underground Comics, Acetate cel animation, & Life in general.

How's about a fresh case of metaphors to describe my love for the old style of comics and animation?

You know how back in the day like say, the 60s up until the 2000s depending on when you were born or how you grew up, etc., you find that the decade you were born exactly wasn't all that much bells and whistles when it came to cleanliness?

For me, it's a matter of dealing with my first 4 years of living in Vancouver from 1999 to 2004.

(I still live in Vancouver to this day)

Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is I remember a very distinct smell from my very early childhood from 1999 to 2004..... or was it 2005?

Anyway, once you get ahold of that smell into your system, you can't seem to get it out of your system but times are a changing and that brings in a whole slew of new odors.

For me, it was the smell of tobacco smoke, mediocre marijuana or beer scents from the various stores or pubs me and my family sometimes pass by on Commercial Drive. 

Other times it was fresh paint, oil stains, wood veneers, gasoline, etc.

Sure, those smells still exist but today's amalgamations of those smells are very different from what I smelled with my own nostrils back when I was just a young lad of 2 to 7 Summers.

That's how I imagined those smells when I think of the old days when Underground Adult Comics were more rampant 

and a time when animation was still done on old-fashioned Acetate celluloid and 35MM or 70MM acetate photography.

Man, nostalgia hits you one way or another but when I look at nostalgia related pages on social media like FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM, or REDDIT, the type of nostalgia is just focused only on one thing.

To really understand nostalgia, you also got to remember what the smell of your personal environment was back in the day.

From about 1999 to 2004, it was mostly food, light beer, smoke, McDonalds food, etc. 

The Fresh Paint thing was mostly 2003 to late 2004 when I lived in this house on Myrtle Street in Burnaby, BC, and it often reeked of Fresh Paint.... probably because my father was painting all the time even though it wasn't his actual job.

Man, those smells were a sign of much better times despite the hurdles such as the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, The 1992 recession, Kosovo, Y2K, etc.

And it's also the eras of real men with proper manly builds such as well chiseled chins, well groomed hair(Both head and body) and where the hands were much bigger and fingers had a bigger circumference.

Nowadays, you only get that Big-Ass finger circumference from still-living holdouts, but they don't cover the entirety of the male population.

To prove my point, Compare some of our nerd hands to the hands of men I encounter at my Baptist Church who are often twice my age who often have big hands or what I call MAN-HANDLES who's finger circumferences are  larger than mine and have more firm grips than even mine have.

Why do real men from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s have better builds and better fingers than our skinny nerd fingers?

Because those men had hardships to deal with. They had to deal with big-ass responsibilities such as garage work, car repairs, serving in Vietnam, etc.

But I bet your Gen X dads have built all that from learning all of their lessons from their Boomer or GI Generation fathers who've had even bigger hardships from the depression in the 30s to serving in WWII and Korea which in turn have made them into the manly men we know and love.

And all of this good-old day ramblings don't apply just to boys but also to girls as well. 

To really give you the gist of all of this, I often ask my mother what her childhood was like back in the late 70s to mid 90s and the stories often go on and on and on. 

It ranges from things such as my maternal grandmother prohibiting my mother from doing any fun stuff, to not letting her buy computers such as a Commodore, to even whipping via a belt.

"ALL WORK & NO PLAY MAKE JACK A DULL BOY " indeed.

I'd go crazy if I grew up like that with no fun in my life and I just do nothing but leather making.

The belt whipping thing thankfully is not something parents do anymore since it's considered domestic abuse but those stories are real. I'm going to ask my mother again and confirm my findings in the future when I have the time.

But the way I see thing, nowadays parenting is not what it was like. My guess is today's parents learn from how they were disciplined back in the day but instead of emulating that, we try to enforce a more gentle approach.

We are born with Free Will but parents have changed their focus to make sure we grow up clean and without faults and that even means controlling our viewing habits.

Steve Williams, AKA SPAZ, would flip out over how my generation has turned out to be...

To prove my point without the chainsaw metaphor, I often do read his LinkedIn posts but SPAZ seriously has no chill on his posts about how he feels about the state of the film industry whatsoever and he's not even apologetic about it.....

Wait.... that's him talking about the industry, not life in general...

Oh well, "THE LOT OF THEM" indeed.

And you know what, he might be right. 

That's the same thing I have when it comes to remembering scents from childhood. 

I get that people would rather want to go back in time and relive their childhoods but we currently don't have the technology to manufacture a reliable time machine..... at least in our lifetime.

*sigh* A man can dream though.... A man can dream.