Now Playing: Beck: Everybody's gotta learn sometime..
Topic: My mind's attic
Let's see: I do have a considerable amount of annoying habits and traits; a surplus, many would agree. Which, of course, float more readily to the surface now that I am getting older. I know, I know: my recent obsession with the age thing is just one of them. Still, consider the mental problematic of a man who has physically aged along with everyone else, acquaintances, strangers and friends. Yet mentally a retardation of time set in at an early age. It has always been a deficit of a few years, which has now grown into more than a decade and half.
Thus we will be talking or debating or arguing or joking: and in the middle of it all someone nearly always does a double-take. As if they saw me for the first time, without the rosy spectacles words and phrases can impose on listeners. Suddenly they count the lines and the weigh the gray fringes on the side. Aided perhaps by a reference to a different era they are confronted with the blunt truth. Few mustered the nerve, yet some have blurted it out, arresting the small talk around us.
That discrepancy also drives memories and their erasure. Some of it, naturally, is simple self-preservation. Our minds can hold on to only so much After which something has to give. I don't know if our capacity is really shrinking, or if it simply that preoccupations are rising as years go by. I just wish memory would talk to more detailed directions from us. So that I can forget not only the woman in the middle distance, with her butterfly glasses and those legs sticking out from under my sweater. And maybe remember someone else's name and face from way, way back when; maybe even instead of the lady silently mouthing the lyrics of a song that seemed to make her amazingly happy yesterday, on the subway. She has been stuck in a corner of my meandering mind like a commercial jingle.
What am I to do with her?
