Me: "Good morning...what do you want to talk about?"
Him: "Hydrogen"
That was all. I erupted in laughter. The man knew he wanted to talk to Hydrogen. Who knows what they want to talk about? Well, I do, now. I want to talk about Time, and my relationship with Time, and not a fear of it, not a sadness that we all feel when we realize we are old and awful and gross, but more about it's power and ability to morph and shapeshift.
I think of something like Facebook and what they are doing with Timeline, and they are not doing the idea of making your life a digital journal justice, and hopefully someday someone will get it right...but even the way they formulate time on the page - with a linear bar running vertically, implying that your life is just a dot here and a dot there - a sequential collection of nonsense that somehow has added up to make you, you...
That has just started to irk me. I think of Time now more like a volcano. I was watching lava erupt on TV the other day and it was mind blowing how it looks like its moving in slow motion, but its not, its just heavy and thick, and it disappears into itself and piles itself into a shape only to be another shape a few minutes later. That's how I feel about time, and how I feel we interact with time.
Sure, bits are linear, we have developed clocks and calendars and ways to count time, but what we never figured out was how to account for those moments in your life, in all of our everyday lives, where we absolutely are emotionally transported back to a different moment, in our lives. I was always astonished by those glimpses into our past, mostly because of how real they feel...then I realized that I was thinking of it incorrectly. If I was looking at it like Facebook looks at it, it is linear, and those moments when we feel the past are just a little mindgame, but that cannot be right.
I was doing some work at home and I put on Oasis' Be Here Now, the band's follow up to their mega hit and Fisher Life Changing album, Morning Glory. I can reach back and put together the details of purchasing this album, and I can picture the Tower Records in Boston, and even put some images in my brain of what that day was like and who I was with, but then when I heard the first few notes, my brain wasn't playing a trick, it was talking to me, engaging me in a conversation, allowing me to actually feel the past.
I immediately was brought to Kirkland, WA, where my parents lived for about a year, and where I went with Trav the day after I bought this album. At the moment when I did the lava meld back to '97 I wasn't picturing a record store, or the weather, or how Seattle smelled... I can find all that in my brain, but the voyage was more emotional, and more about me feeling the feeling of '97.
Music is continually doing this to me, and I can't tell when its going to happen, and I can't predict it, but it's doing it, continuously, persistently, and without vengeance. It isn't always awesome, I see a smile on TV and I'm shifted immediately back to painful memories of a broken heart - or I'm watching football highlights and the sight Steve Young's #8 jersey makes me feel like I felt at Keri's party the night the 49ers beat the Cowboys in the NFC Championship Game...and the night my Grandmother passed away. That's not linear, that's the opposite. It's a welcomed kick in the pants.
I'm in the process right now of taking some mix tapes Luke made for me in High School and College and putting them into MP3 format. I could just go online, try to buy the individual songs, and try to piece them back together, but the authenticity of the tapes is what I'm looking forward to.
I can't wait until one morning when I hit play on the iPod while I am driving in my car on Route 2 heading to my job, feeling like a 34 year old that stinks at sports now and can't remember where his car keys are...and instantly feel like the 17 year old kid who at at Pizza Hut & Uno's every other night with a collection of amazing friends all because of a song. I have a lot to be grateful for now, and I'm all for it, but the past is as much a part of me as the present, and I love how present it always is.
