old notebook

8/12/06

"I had a dream that a young woman was to be reunited with her son. She knew who he was, but he didn't know her. She was afraid to tell him. It wasn't the right time, so she watched him, drank him in. Tried to live a life already past. It made her happy to know that he was good, and a little secretive/excited because he was oblivious to her presence. It never occured to her that he might deny her. She only had this complacency, this contentedness. Those few moments will never come again."


I remember that she was watching him in a park, talking with his friends. I still wonder if I was the woman in the dream, or I was watching the watcher.

I've also been unstuck, physically, lately. It's gotten advanced enough that I can tell when my mind is going to skip to a place - I can anticipate it now, and I can figure out where I'm going before I get there. It's not always someplace I've been to before. Read More...

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.

--

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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"the grand tragedy of a seven-year-old brother" / mountain tan commercials

Found today, in a notebook:

-"for three days, I had a son"

-"poor husband and wife living with husband's parents (rich)"

-"just had baby (son) who looks like Q-bert (?)"

-"son dies (weak), wife dies (complications)"

-"like the grand tragedy of a seven-year-old brother"

From what I can gather, I wrote this after I had a dream about having a Q-bert son and him dying three days after he was born. I seem to remember slow-motion sequences of googly eyes looking up at me set to Sufjan Stevens' "Flint (For The Unemployed and Underpaid)". Just after my son died, my wife died of "complications" (perhaps some video game-related post-partum depression), and I was left to wander around what, apparently, was my parents' mansion. The whole thing struck me as incredibly fucking sad and the feeling stayed with me the whole day. I mean, come on. Look at him.

Now that I take a good look back, I'm not exactly sure what my subconscious mind was trying to tell me. Either "cherish your entire family, all the time, forever" or "cherish Sufjan Stevens, all the time, forever". Both seem like legitimate courses of action.

---

Meanwhile, this Brit kid named Arch M has been producing little gems of slightly fuzzy, brilliant-noon-sun pop. Sounds like if El Guincho was white and a little sadder and noisier, but just a touch. Pick up his latest cassette EP here for free. His Myspace-exclusive song, "21st Union", is one of those quick little things that make you nostalgic for something you know you never had and never will have. Read More...