Tuesday, September 2, 2008

unfamiliar place

Since I was a child, certain things have awakened certain memories in me. One particularly strange one is the feeling of hot water on my face - for some reason, it brings to mind images of the houses I've lived in, of nondescript nights that I really have no reason to remember. These memories are always quite vivid, often including odd details that strike me as highly quotidian and insignificant - a TV show that's no longer running, the color of the tile in my dead grandparents' bathroom, and so on. Now, those occurances, by themselves, aren't that weird. What really unsettles me is when something causes a memory to rise and I realize that the memory never happened.

I remember playing with a little train-shaped keychain my grandfather had. It made train noises when you pressed a button on it - whistling, chugging, whatever other sounds trains make. I also remember that it evoked an black-and-white image of a train coming out of a tunnel. After this, the memory's "camera", so to speak, would move onto to a little townhouse next to the train where the lighting was vaguely pre-electric and dim and the wallpaper was a faded calico pattern. Needless to say, I have no recollection of ever seeing this image outside of my mind. 

There are a lot of other occurances like this one, but I think that's the first I remember happening. I've never heard anyone else mention it happening to them, but it doesn't really cause me harm or cross my synapses or anything, so I'm prepared to let it slide by as weird quirk of the brain.

And no, I didn't read "Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge" until a couple years ago, so there's that.

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Anyway, you know who I miss? Cibo Matto. Fuck. I was going over why they were so good in my mind earlier, and I couldn't come to any conclusions. Anybody who's got their shit together musically does the sort of fusion that they did back in the day, and there's no shortage of weird Japanese bands out there now. I think, though, that no one has replicated the strangely ominous edge those two had in their songs. Viva La Woman's lyrics were all about food, but some of the songs were fucking scary. It was like you were being taken on a trip you reluctantly decided to go on, and the stuff that you're seeing now is so vibrant and jumbled that you can't completely process everything and your sense of reality begins to blur. 
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