And just like that, a month goes by between updates. Somehow it never feels like it's that long away... and then it is.
So, I'm back, in some capacity anyway, and hoping to put the newly-freed time to better use than what I've been doing lately, which is loafing and playing way too much pinball. The weekly library walk is a good sanity-maintainer, as it's something to look forward to in the work week and good exercise for the largely sedentary lifestyle of someone who makes his living behind a keyboard. Our library system has a number of branches and a particularly excellent online system for reserving books and having them ready for pickup at any branch. I don't know if this is the norm now, but it's incredibly convenient.
That cassette collection (of questionable taste) lived in one of those huge zippered nylon cases under the bed in my dorm room, and was fed at first thanks to the largess of the back catalog of the BMG Music Club (12 albums for a penny!), by careful duplication of friend's cassettes, and then in years later, by legging it to the library to riffle through their CDs. Some of those old albums are permanently embedded in my brain with the place, so (for example) the tape I made that backed Naked Lunch with Different Trains automatically takes me back to a late-night drive across central Indiana to pick up a friend from the airport. Some of the more regrettable 80's pop songs are instant time-travel back to college years, walking around the pond near campus just as autumn was turning and all the sugar maples dropping continual showers of orange and yellow leaves. (This ink color is close, but nowhere as vivid.)
Scent is a powerful memory-trigger, but I think music is an actual time machine for your brain.
4 comments:
I agree, there's some music I simply can't listen to without the danger of timeslip, sometimes even physical displacement. It's awkward to explain oneself if you're not careful. (:
Looking forward to a resumption of typecast, should I be?
No physical displacement to speak of (yet) but the memory of the old place sometimes superimposes itself over the reality of the current place, if that makes any sense. I pity the part of my brain responsible for housecleaning.
Hoping for a triumphant return to typecasting, too. It's getting warm enough now that a night on the front porch with a laptop (read: Skyriter) would be just about perfect.
Lovely handwriting as always - what pen? Hmm, that sounded like the backhanded comment on a photo, like, "Nice photo, what kind of camera did you use?", as if to imply the tool did all the work. But I'm curious about the perfect width of what looks like an italic nib.
Interesting that we share the tendency to write "out" when we mean "our".
I agree that music can stimulate memories. Recently on a car trip i pulled a mix CD out of the visor and up came We Five and America, and we both felt like we were couring again.
Very fun post.
"Courting", OMG, did i say that? Been reading too many 19th century books, I guess.
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