Whoever dredged up the music for the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Deadpool’ movies is a genius.

I’ve pondered this for weeks as I trailed through the music on YouTube and where it lead me, even as I did other things – new hobbies, old habits. There’s a wash of nostalgia that I felt but couldn’t explain.

It bothers me when I can’t explain something. Little Groot dancing to the songs he did made me think back to the years where I rode around in the back seat of an array of cars, between States, between places, the journey almost always better than the destinations largely because of the music that oozed out of the impedance matched 8 track systems. To listen to the music is to want to feel the wind across my face and through my hair from the wound down window of the back seat of the Barracuda, or the station wagon, of the Power Wagon… and of the horrible radio in the ugly blackish Duster in Dayton, Ohio.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt-tLuszKBA]

Undisturbed from the normalcy of what society defines life as – that busy and unproductive suite of actions that people fumble through daily – I was able to reconnect with thoughts and emotions that had been locked away for decades, the soundtrack of innocence of my age through the ears of hard won knowledge and wisdom.

We forget too much.

I suppose as we grow older – we get caught up in what society demands of us in the unfortunate Faustian bargain we are born into – different for everyone, yet the cost never truly seems to give us the value that we were sold in our innocence.

Do this. Get that. Follow this path. Get to this destination. Stay on the path. Scorn those off the path. Work hard and everything will work out.

Bullshit successes, largely, empty of meaning when achieved all because in that bargain born into, we never get to negotiate our own bargains because we don’t truly know what we can get, we are told we can get whatever we want…. and largely, we don’t. So we settle, we lose our dreams, we lose who we are in trying to become who we are not.

And yet, we can remember the days with the window down, the wind in our hair and across our faces, and the comfort of music through a now antique music system even as we watch the world visually attached to flat screens instead of the shifting landscape, with ears plugged with headphones locking people away from the world around them, lost to the collective Faustian bargains of those who came before.

In odd moments, prompted by music from our childhood, we remember these things – and I am left wondering what the newer generations will remember of their childhood in the Faustian bargains that previous and our own generations sold them.

We are Groot – tendrils of ourselves creating the new society, making the handles of tools that can be weapons, making weapons that can be tools, not forging ahead as in the Industrial narrative hammered into my generation by the Faustian blacksmiths of before.

Organically, we reach through the generations with the things we trade, and we only see the hours of toil instead of the shifting agreement for the hours of toil. In youth, we do not understand the world, and in age few of us do beyond our own little perspective, increasingly fed by what others tell us to think through the flat screens.

Where are the open windows of the backseats of cars that blew our hair, with soundtracks written by lyricists who lead us to question, to play, to ponder?

We were Groot. I’m not sure we still are.