Tense Confusions

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Every once in a while it comes back to haunt me. Not very often or for very long, but when it comes it feels like a cross between fetishism and archeology. Maybe I am the one doing the haunting. Why do I go and pick through the past like some old lady with too many cats at yet another yard sale, looking for that long lost LP of Elton tunes or maybe a forgotten first edition of "The Joke"?
Truth is, the past is too easily forgotten or made irrelevant. But it is right that this should be the case, I suppose. The trick is the balance between whimsical nostalgia and pathetic obsession. I don't want to end up like some I have known, crying how everything once was right, and how Camelot is lost. It is sad to be so self-limiting.
As I sit here and contemplate another day, another commute, another class taken, I think it is ever more important to think of the past in order to lessen the present - to bring it down to size. The "travails" I suffer today are not so horrible compared to what I suffered before. Trouble is, should I take heart in the comparison?
The past is a lesson, but I'm never quite sure what to take from it.

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