My Multidimensional Versions Through the Ages

 

My Happy Hobbit Childhood

Me, ME, ME!

This represents a little project I did back in the last years of the 20^th Century, when I had my first computer and copy ink was cheap and plentiful. What I did was makes scans of photos of me through the years, blow them up to a page size, and then made a sort of collage/paneled pin-up on my bedroom door.

I did this not so much out of vanity but more as a psychological experiment, a sort of record of how I developed, ballooned, grew hairy, then scrimpled with age. To see my past selves all staring at me, through various stages of hopefulness and expectation (and yes, somehow, judgement) produced a peculiar feeling of responsibility, an indefinable feeling of continuity that might best be summed up as “Get busy, old man.” And, in an odd way, it was a cheering section. You’ve come this far; make it count.

I decided to memorialize it with a Polaroid (do you remember Polaroids? More clumsy and expensive than just snapping a picture with a phone), but I could only fit it in in two go’s. It’s just as well I did, because in due time I tripped and spattered some tea across it. I took it down and I still have the splashed pages tucked away somewhere in the Family Files. But I have these scans of the Polaroids, themselves now a reminder of the past Brer who made them.