ZOID RAGE-surviving the intensely suckstalgic onslaught when memories attack

I was nine during Christmas of 1983 was when I got my first Zoids. They were a big deal for me that year because Star Wars got old and Transformers wasn't out yet. I was inbetween serious toylationships and looking for a good time and here they were-motorized robot dinosaur models. They were fantastic. I had two of them-the Tyrannosaurus looking one and the elephant looking one. My parents also got my younger sister the duck one. I don't think the first wave models had names but at nine years old it didn't matter. Mr. Tyrannosaurus, Mr. Elephant and Mr. Duck all worked good for me. I thought they were awesome with their little gold driver pilots. I guess they were the very first robot toys I ever loved. All that changed though and when I think about those Zoids now I feel like smashing my skull in with a sledgehammer. Nostalgia isn't just the warm fuzzy feelings I get from old toy robots-sometimes it cuts the other way, too.

I remember a couple days after Christmas I was playing with all three Zoids when my sister came in the room and noticed her duck Zoid was broken. I don't remember breaking it but a very important plastic piece was snapped off and he couldn't walk anymore. Then she started crying and she said, "Why do you always break my things! You always break my things!" I felt horrible and that memory has lived with me to this day. For some reason it didn't bother me much when I destroyed my own toys but seeing her all upset made me feel like I was some sort of robot duck killing monster.

Well 23 years later in 2006 those same three Zoids got rereleased in Japan in a big box set along with two other Zoids from 1983 and at first I was excited but I couldn't bring myself to order them. Every time I looked at Mr. Duck Zoid on that reissue box I just kept remembering my sister crying. Later in 1983 when commercials for the Omega Supreme of Zoids-the Giant Zrk-played on television constantly, I really wanted it but I knew I didn't deserve it after the assassination of Mr. Duck Zoid. Later on in life I used the martyrdom of Mr. Duck Zoid to convince myself that I didn't deserve nice things like lobster thermidor and hookers. It's been over twenty years! You'd think I could get over it and order something decent at Red Lobster, but it's like my brain likes to fuck me over constantly by bringing up Mr. Duck Zoid at the most inappropriate times.

Stuck living life with my Zoid albatross, I began wondering if I was the only one for whom nostalgia is a sort of rabid brain attacking chupacabra. Everyone else is always describing nostalgia as fond recollections of good old days. Why then does Mr. Duck Zoid set off an avalanche of disastrously sucky childhood memories? Why do others get nostalgia and I get some sort of suckstalgia? Well I've been reading an old article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions and it turns out I'm not so alone. In fact, the paper kicks off by explaining that nostalgia the word is derived from two greek words , nostos (return) and algos (suck) and it literally means the suck you feel from wanting to go back. Nostalgia was regarded by people in the 17th and 18th centuries as a neurological fuckuppedness. Back then if you were nostalgic the doctors thought it meant something was wrong with your brain! And although doctors don't think that anymore, I think it still applies.

Glidoler? I never even knew her!

The paper explores what exactly nostalgia is and how it works. It finds that nostalgia is often triggered by a shitty mood. It's a response that's activated when a person is feeling down so that their brain can look back on happier times and try to feel good again. Nostalgia then is the refuge of a lonely and depressed mind. But why would my brain try to take me back to crappy times when I see or think about Mr. Duck Zoid? Why do old Zoids give me sudden urge to claw my eyes out with my thumbs? Maybe this isn't nostalgia I'm feeling at all but a new phenomenon that psychologists have yet to diagnose-Zoid Rage. I'm only up through the ninth page of the nineteen page paper so I don't have definite answers about Zoid Rage but it's starting to look like there are reasons for negative nostalgia. Maybe my mind needs an extremely negative experience from the past so that things now won't seem so bad by comparison. Maybe I don't really like hookers and lobster thermidor. Maybe my mind doesn't want to spend 90 bucks on a reissued box of five Zoids. Maybe I'm supposed to go to weddings and teach random guests that we must love all Zoids that JesusBabyJesus made, both great and small. But I doubt it.