What an amusing thing that i am doing at this moment! I am making a tape for Julie VanLoh, whom I have not seen nor heard from since October of 1996. I was the one who did not keep up the contact, however, and I am quite regretful of that. The one day we spent together meandering about Anchorage trying to find a church to attend stamped some sort of indelible impression on my mind. It keeps recurring in my dreams. Strange. What does her eidolon mean to me? “Tea for One” pours into my wax-laden ear sockets to bathe me with some semblance of a nostalgia which is mostly conjured from the neurotic tendencies in my bedraggled brain. It should have been “The Beating of the Bedraggled Brain”. Screw the heart. It’s just a workhorse with no more mind than Jeff’s ubiquitous pumpjack.
“A past that lives if only for the present,” croons Peter Hammill. Why am I so rife with nostalgia? What is that fleeting yet perpetual feeling which permeates my being when I am in contentment? Or is it this which is actually the source of contentment? Without it shall I be lost in a terrifying maze of meaninglessness? A tenet of mine has always been the search for meaning in my life, in others’ lives, in everything around me, to connect and construct from the scattered debris of sensory input a well woven tapestry, beautiful to the eye, satisfying to the mind. Mayhap nostalgia is my way of weaving the past into the present, gathering up all of the loose strings which hiss & strike at me like vipers. If that is who I am, then I believe, at this point in my life, I have chosen to live with it; moreover, I have encouraged it to flourish. Good for me. I finally accept at least a part of who I am. Is it true? I cannot escape from my personality any more than I can flee from my skin.
