An afternoon dissertation on waffle nostalgia

Good afternoooooooooooooooooooooooooon, breadheads!

It’s actually past midnight as I write this, but hey, maybe it’s afternoon for some of you. In any case it’s the thought that counts and it’s always afternoon in the eternal pseudo-sunset of my flighty heart and time is a relative conception anyway and e is equal to mc squared and THANK YOU EINSTEIN FOR RUINING MY DAY.

I have digressed.

Big news for us breadheads: we’re diversifying. Since I’m rapidly running out of new types of bread to eat and produce social commentaries about, I’m ‘broadening the lens’, as it were, to bread-based food items. Today, I ate waffles – which kind of counts as bread if you’re progressive enough, I guess? Who are we to indiscriminately bisect bread society into arbitrary confinements of color, taste or inherent value, anyway?

This says a lot about society. 

To me, eating waffles carries with it a heartfelt nostalgia – I have very fond memories of a particular trip to Australia that I took with my family years ago when we exclusively ate over-sweetened Belgian waffles for breakfast. I did not enjoy said waffles. However, I am grateful for the memories that that experience bestowed onto me, and for that, to Belgian waffles, I am deeply and truly grateful. Nostalgia is a powerful, powerful emotion – the most powerful human emotion, I think (apart from fear, of course). I’m a pretty sentimental guy, so maybe it’s just me – but I’m particularly susceptible to a strong and unexpected outburst of raw reminiscence for the past; transfixing, resolute, like an unflinchingly visceral voice from the indefinite depths of long-forgotten memory; a warm, enveloping embrace from the benevolent, faceless past, gripping me into a misty-eyed, rose-tinted desire to return to that place that exists only in my mind and nowhere else and I think I’m tearing up I can’t see the keys ob the keybokard clearly

This says a lot about society.

Not really. But hey, it sounded cool. Orwell calls it ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’: basically a desire to make things sound cool. If I’m being honest, this is one of the driving reasons behind why I write – the main reason being to give y’all breadheads some food for thought! But anyway, enough about me – let’s go back to nostalgia.

Think about a place that you miss. Or a person, or a thing, or anything for that matter. Better yet, stay up late and play the music you listened to a few years ago. My guess is you feel nostalgic, and it hits hard. Man, it hits me hard. I think manipulating the human penchant for nostalgia is an untapped market that modern corporations haven’t yet found a way to package and commodify and advertise and turn into an All-In-One-Super-Duper-Nostalgia-Maker-O-Nater-200000 (Buy 213 get 1.5 free!), available now in stores near you.

This says a lot about socieOH SHUT UP.

Ranting about market fundamentalism always reminds me of Wall-E (which, I think, is a masterpiece). That is all. I do not feel particularly nostalgic about watching Wall-E.

I think maybe nostalgia is also what drives reactionary politics – I don’t mean to point fingers, but many modern conservative American talking points revolve around restoring things to the way they were (see: Make America Great Again). This isn’t an inherently negative sentiment by any means, but it can be used to tap into older voters’ belief that things were just Better when they were young, even if they weren’t. 

In conclusion, waffles are Republicans. In this essay I will argue that this says a lot about society