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

Little triggers

[mcbrennan.livejournal.com]

Before I add any, I have to acknowledge two of yours. The clove cigarettes, wholeheartedly. I too never actually smoked 'em, but damn. The faintest hint of cloves in the air and I'm fifteen years old, out way too late, with people much too cool for me, listening to some of the greatest music of my life. Probably, um, Talk Talk.

Okay, maybe it was Plastic Bertrand or the Jam or something, who can remember.

"Warehouse" has enormous power for me, too. The opening guitar chord on "These Important Years." For me it wasn't about pure depression, but like the Huskers I was spinning apart fast when I first heard it, and that sort of turgid whirlygig desperation overwhelms me when I hear it now. Still, it's a record I love.

There are countless music ones. Big Star's Third is the strongest, probably. I love it but I can't listen to it anymore. I think we've all heard the one about the mopey girl who listens to "holocaust" whilst gobbling tranquilizers by the fistful. Those days are behind me, (by at least six months), but "Big Star's 3rd" brings them right back. I think sometimes when I hear it my heart reflexively tries to stop beating.

I have a million of 'em. Smells trigger a cascade of flashbacks. Often I don't even know what it is. Burning fireworks, especially Sparklers, take me back to a house on a hill in Nebraska in 1975. I'm barefoot, dirty, the air is thick and wet. Jocular adults all around, in aluminum lawn furniture, smelling of Falstaff and Pabst Blue Ribbon and Pall Malls. I feel at once innocent and broken. I know things about these people nobody should know.

Yeah. There's this smell--it's hard to describe--it's the sonoran desert before and during a monster summer storm. I'm 12, 13, on the roof of our trailer, a web of lightning crackling above my head, standing with arms outstreched, daring God to strike me down dead, defiant (later amended to "stupid.") A literally mile-high cloud of dust on the horizon, coming my way. I was one with something then. I don't know what.

I have hundreds of 'em. Manure, reminds me of horse tracks my mom dragged me to. Chemical fog, the inside of every bad bar in San Francisco. Perfumes and colognes, exotic foods, in-dash 8-track decks getting too hot, sex smells, musty pre-1940 books, the inside of a Datsun 710, the water on the Pirates of the Carribean--you name it, I'm off to the Proustian races. Three volume novels, as I'm sure you've noticed, drop out of my ass with distressing regularity. Oops, here's one now.