I straighten my visor and open my silver reflective umbrella. It’s a searing hot day in August 2025, and I’m walking across the big empty lot behind my apartment on my way to work. The gravelly, weed-filled expanse always makes me think of a desert, not that I’ve ever experienced one. On a sensory front, I have never liked the sun and find it overstimulating, but the alternative is a too-expensive bus pass and trying to squeeze time in during an already busy work week for exercise. So walk to work I do, diligently, as I have almost every day for five years.
“Work” for me is a beautiful stationery shop. It’s not a job I love as much anymore, and I give a little sigh as I pop my earbuds in and thumb my way to my music app, selecting to play “Dire, Dire Docks” from Super Mario 64 for the fortieth time during this particular leg of my commute. It adds a cheerful spin to what would otherwise be a sensory hell-filled moment, and reminds me of long-ago summers, when I was undiagnosed ADHD/autistic kid who spent as much time as I could avoiding the oppressive sunshine.
We didn’t have a Nintendo 64 at my house (though we loved our secondhand NES). You know how growing up you’d have those first cousins with a really nice house whose parents gave them all the latest and greatest toys: Barbie’s Dream House, the little yellow and orange Fisher Price car, and all the VHS tapes with address labels on the inside of the puffy clamshells? I had cousins like that whose toys I got to play with, and those were the best days. They happened most often during the summertime, when school wrapped up and wall-to-wall free time began.
Before my mom got sick and passed on, there was a brief, four-year or so period where I got to have a (mostly) normal childhood with summers I enjoyed. I can remember going to the corner store for freezies and renting movies. I had friends that had pool parties with ice cream cake. I experienced the blissful relief of cool, dark basements to play hide and seek and video games. I ran in a bucket hat at sunset waving bubble wands through grassy backyards with a group of other kids, determining who could blow the biggest bubble. I’m happy to have those memories.
How “Dire, Dire Docks” became my most frequently listened to track in 2025 I can only speculate. I never even played Super Mario 64 myself, preferring to watch my cousins explore the halls of Peaches’ castle and the levels that dwelled behind the doors and portraits. At some point, my Instagram algorithms began presenting me with slideshows of both genuine and (no doubt) AI-generated images of life back in the 90s, always to the tune of either Scizzie’s cover of “Aquatic Ambiance”, the underwater level score of Donkey Kong Country, or “Dire, Dire Docks”. I gazed at these reels fondly, remembering my own childhood.
Today, the nostalgic track takes me just as much forward as back, as I associate it with the future I aspire to have. As a kid I wanted to be an adult that lived during the 90s, with songs by Nora Jones, Chantal Kreviazuk, and Dido being the soundtrack of my life. It seemed so cozy and far away. Now I’m in my thirties, and I can still pretend I’m back there by playing those songs and reveling in being someone who works from home, becoming the freelance writer that little me dreamed I’d be. While that’s my full-time dream that I’m moving towards, for now I deal with the heat on the way to my conventional job with a tune that feels pleasantly tropical, and returns me to days that were light on responsibility and filled with smiles.
