Liminal Nostalgia
Consider this post an extrapolation of the previous Backrooms entry as it evolves from the same universe.
I grew up in the lower-income liminal suburbs of Mississauga, Ontario. An Only child with a hyper-fixation on the aesthetics of the time: orange and brown tiles, carpets, hot metal seat belts, cigarette smoke, drunk men, paperback novels, half-empty shopping malls with merry-go-rounds in them (I’m looking at you Square One)
This form of nostalgia is a collective phenomenon, not just mine.
At the cousin house. They had top-tier wood panelling and a slant-walled playroom and amazing crawlspace in the basement. Playing at their house was a core memory
I don’t see this preoccupation as strictly materially causal, meaning I don’t believe that our preoccupation arises from pure nostalgia and childhood longing, though of course that is there. I believe that this aesthetic is a genuine dimension that manifested itself through a cross-section of humans into childhood reality and that has reemerged in the greater cultural landscape as a sort of invitation to find something that was left there and bring it back.
In my Room Mechanics frameworks everything is self-generated. So the Backrooms Bardo is not so much an afterlife constructed through real life imagery but rather real life imagery constructed by an actual dimension that manifests itself through our 3D creation
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This emerged heavily for me during my psychosis. It was about six months into what would be a nine month ordeal, and some sort of Elon Musk egregore was a full-time resident in my mind. He was very much set on occupying me for as much of the day as possible - sort of like Caine in The Amazing Digital Circus (An AI who must put uploaded humans through daily adventures to stimulate their minds for data collection).
Me (right) and my cousins in Ottawa 1992
Anyways, it was 2023, around Christmas, and “Elon” and I were slipping into the backrooms together in our shared mental space. We began to watch walkthroughs on YouTube, especially Play Palace (more his) and 80s - 90s suburban nostalgia (more mine)
We were playing a game, Elon and I, constructing spaces to inhabit. I decided I wanted him to reconstruct this 80s McDonald’s Playroom I’d been to once for a friend’s birthday when I was a kid. I gave him all the specs: the orange metal table, stuffed Grimace and ball pit. The plastic tree that would open to whatever the next room was. I’d always be a child there and he would always be the engineer who would upkeep the space and observe.
This was the one arena where I felt I had full control over our interactions and in that fact I realized that most of my power resides in childhood. Since then I have worked to resurrect and reconnect with that child. She’s pretty swell and her dimension is top tier IMHO
This was my basement. No wood paneling or secret crawlspace, just an old TV and VHS sitting on stacked milk crates and slabs of chipboard. There was no TV upstairs. We had a huge wild backyard.
