phantoms

jack black (particularly in school of rock) always reminds me of a tony i knew in high school. so do maroon pontiac grand ams, sometimes.

incubus's pardon me quite often brings to mind a certain chris jordan.

hymn number 7 brings to mind spring break and choir. a tent full of girls and a tent full of boys in the most gorgeous canyon i've ever hiked.

starbucks usually remind me of london. i've never set foot in a starbucks that wasn't in london.

and countless other things remind me of even more countless other things. scarves of schoolbooks. the word skint of a thin blue library book i read once. red phone boxes of ironing boards.

memory is a funny thing.

i can connect the kettle on my kitchen counter to the stew Clare would make out of brussle sprouts and leeks and potatoes to the amazing green couches they had in their sitting room and long, comfortable sunday afternoons, to the interesting paned windows that looked out on spindley little trees in winter.

but that doesn't mean every time i use my kettle i sink into nostalgia. my brain has an excellent trick of only thinking about so many things at once. sometimes it does get caught in winter sundays of three years ago; sometimes it can't even remember where i left my hairbrush.

for an answer to the question why do our brains work in such a spiderwebbed way, i can go back to my high school psychology class, where the fabulously entertaining mr allen demonstrated synapses and neurotransmitters so elegantly. or i can go back to my sherlock holmes novels and metaphors about shelves and lumber yards. or i can just tell myself, as i am forced to do in so many situations, that that is just the way things are.

so all those other things... which ones do i need to remember?

1 thesalonians 5:21 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

okay. good. then what?

well, me, i write stuff down. i just can't hold on to all of it so i weave it into ink.

yesterday i pulled all of my old notebooks off a shelf and reread every page of them, pulling my mind like taffy off into a million different memories. i wrote that after walking past a hair salon one day. i wrote that during western civilization three semesters ago. i wrote most of that in the ill-lit basement apartment i lived in before i moved out here.

where did it all go?
where is that kid tony whom jack black reminds me of?

well, the ill-lit basement apartment is still sitting somewhere on sixth east in logan utah. that kid tony is in georgia somewhere making a movie.

i'm not. i'm sitting at a wooden desk without a drawer, listening to the sheer auditory brilliance of vivaldi. it's july (almost over) and the sun is pasting rolled-out shadows across the front yard outside. my watch says twenty til seven. my feet say get up you've been sitting here too long.

the image i get from all this is sea urchins. the dark, round ones with lots of spikes. somewhere inside of it is me and everything i am most deeply and unchangeably. all the spikes are my strung-out relationships with the rest of the world. my family in washington. the bit of my soul i left in england. pictures of places i've never been. loyalties to people who probably don't care about me. memories of youth and kool-aid and trees that have been cut down.