The standing waves of an underground sea

[substitute]

Nostalgia is acutely painful to me. I am not sure why. When I think about people I miss, or places I've been and not likely to return, it hurts quite a bit. Why I would want to see the woman i was in love with in 1986, or a place I lived in for a short time, or an object I lost 15 years ago, is beyond me. Why does my brain do this?

I seem to be developing a shoe fetish. I never was interested in clothes at all before, but now I always want a new pair of shoes. Could I be turning female?

I can remember very clearly the record that made me realize that I was going to be an underground music fan for life; I picked up a copy of Pere Ubu's "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" in high school because Andrea 'Enthal played it on the radio on KPFK and it blew my mind.

Short paragraphs like this feed the beast. It's MTV forever now; people have short attention spans and eat up life in tiny bits like peanut butter cups. No more Proust; it's all Douglas Coupland now. Or me; I'm cheaper!

I have successfully simplified the martini to: gin from the freezer + olive.

I need love; I need a woman. But with sufficient amounts of macaroni & cheese I can survive without connubial bliss.

30 seconds and a one-way ride
30 seconds and no place to hide
30 seconds over tokyo
30 seconds over tokyo
30 seconds over tokyo

Comments

Livejournal Blipverts

[mcbrennan.livejournal.com]

My brain does it, too. As the nights wear on towards the ugly hours, I often sit here googling the names of old friends and loved ones, trying to figure out what became of them. Once in a while I stumble across some contact information and then begins phase two, in which I agonize over whether I should say hello. Then the internal dialogue kicks in. 'These people have made it perfectly clear they want nothing to do with you! They're successful now, you're an unemployed sad sack! Why do you even care what happened to people you haven't seen in fifteen years?'

Maybe it's that old mechanism where somebody cuts you down and you're speechless, but hours later when you're home alone, you think of the perfect, devestatingly witty retort and replay the incident in your head to infinity. Maybe I just want to see these people, visit these places again to fix something unfixable, convince them somehow that I'm worth knowing or loving, erase my boneheaded mistakes. "Can't Undo," blinks the monitor.

Every once in awhile I wish I was the kind of person someone missed enough to stay up late at night searching for.

But I'm using your journal as therapy again, which technically violates the restraining order. Sorry.

Officially, I don't think it's a fetish unless there's a sexual component. Perhaps you've simply become a shoe connoisseur. Or maybe it's some kind of Shoe OCD, something evil Payless scientists dreamed up. I have about 100 pairs of shoes, and I have no idea why since I wear the same ancient beat-to-hell Vans every day.

The first Pere Ubu album I ever heard was "Cloudland." Not as good, I know, but not terrible. "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" is a fine choice.

You're not just cheaper than Mr. Coupland, you're a much better writer.

Pattern recognition

[torgo-x.livejournal.com]

My private theory is that our brains can't really understand time -- they really just parse time with some crazy hack of projecting it back onto place. So my brain is totally sure that if I take a plane to Burbank and drive down that street, what I'll find there will be a chunk of 1988, my high school, and I'll be 16. My locker will still be on the top floor. The fact that the school is totally gone is not at all taken into consideration -- a dream I had five years ago about high school has more effect than the fact I can even go to the school's web site.

Meanwhile, we have all become a teaser for suckcom:

"Past 2 AM, raining. There was no
one to email, no one to talk to,
simply the company of my own
indwelling self-doubt monsters
and longings ill-becoming my
station. What there was, was to hit
Alta Vista and get into trouble."

-- "Nitecrawler",
Suck.com for 01996-04-12

Re: Pattern recognition

[mcbrennan.livejournal.com]

A) Your theory is dead-on. I've been trying in vain to find the map back to those places and my thick brain won't accept that it's not happening. No wonder reality--especially in places i once lived--seems to get more disturbing with each passing day.

B)Oh my god, I'm a frickin' online cliché. And almost 9 years out of date, as well. I should have seen this coming.