Proustian moments

[substitute]

A Proustian moment is when you do something like dip a cookie in tea and eat it and BOOM a three volume novel flies out of your ass. I get these a lot. Some recent ones:

• Listening to even a bit of Hüsker Dü's "Warehouse: Songs and Stories" sends me directly back to the worst of my depression of the early 1990s, with a physical sensation in the pit of my stomach and everything.
  
  
• Similarly, the diesel roar of a Santa Monica City Bus going by my office window drops me in the time of my life where I was frequently waiting for a bus, or chasing one, or sitting in one staring out the window. A sense of helpless frustration wells up in me.
  
  
• Burnt microwave popcorn is a ticket back to the UCLA dormitories 20 years ago, going through the lobby and hearing the top 40 station, seeing the pizza guys arriving, on my way home from late nights studying or some rock 'n' roll show.
  
  
• The smell of nasty old cigarette ashes makes me feel hopeful, excited, as though I'm about to do something new and rewarding. Because the computer room in junior high school, where I fell in love with automata, was also the math teachers' break room.
  
  
• Clove cigarettes are the 1980s and live music and excitement. Despite the fact that I never smoked them.
  

What're yours?

Comments

[the1withtheeyes.livejournal.com]

The smell of the electronics department makes me happy and hopeful. I got a sterio for getting the "B" in reading, in the second grade, I had worked so hard for.

I have a plastic pendant I found at a flee market when I was a very little girl. It has a prismatic effect when held and moved around in the light. When I run across it from time to time, I look into it, swirling it around. At that moment all the innosence and shear wonder of the worlds unexplainable, comes flooding in. I often wonder if it's the past, or the device itself, that does this to me.

My mother's old perfume, Tabu. The childhood connection between Brian and I.

The hollow sound foot steps make on the floor at The Ranch. I can feel our first summer there. Those 2 years will be remembered as it's own lifetime.

The occational wiff of just the right sort of vinigar strikes a mild gag reflex. Heroin addiction, and all that came with it.