Just Like Starting Over….

Great song.

 I grew up a child of the eighties with a father who never really left the 60’s when it came to music.  It is amazing how so many of these things stick with you over time.  I can say with total confidence that it has been at least a decade since I have listened to a Beatles album all the way through (and yes, I am including their solo careers in this statement); but even tho I may not listen to them as much as I did as a younger dude, I still remember each lyric of each song.

 Wonderful memory trigger, music is.  And don’t worry, I may occassionally fall into Yoda-speak, but not often.  The fact stands that music lyrics, once they have touched you, manage to stay with you even when you least expect it.  A couple minutes ago when I was thinking of the first thing to post on this, that John Lennon song wasn’t on my mind at all.  Instead I was thinking of my one previous attempt at this blogging thing many moons ago.  I never kept up with it and like so many flights of fancy it was gone before I barely noticed it was there.

 Still…I liked the title of that old blog, so I decided to use it again.  Consider this the second coming of something that no one ever noticed the first time around!

 Enough about that, tho.  Now I have this John Lennon song on my mind.  This one and others.  Songs that I haven’t thought about in ages, but are now flying through my mind in a bizarre cacaphony of melody and memory.  Suddenly I am not sitting in front of the cold light of my laptop, but instead I am sitting in my bedroom directly upstairs from my parent’s room.  It is late, and I have to get up early for practice in the morning…but I can’t sleep.  I’m sitting up with a stack of comics listening to the soundtrack for “Imagine: John Lennon.”  In a time without cell phones or email, I’m alone with no one except my dreams and imagination to keep me company over the long night.  I have a towel along the bottom of my door in case my Mother wakes up, she won’t see my light on.

This is my world – my sanctuary.  By the time I was 16 I had already buried one of my closest friends, and I was convinced that I alone in this vast world understood what loss and pain meant.  I only hope that the people then did not see the fool that I was that I see so clearly now.  It is so funny that when we are younger we have everything so figured out, save for that one thing…our inability to realize just how incredibly dumb we were.  Half of the reason why I am building a time machine is so I can go back and beat the stupid out of my younger self.

Wait – did I say “time machine?”  I meant “swamp gas.”

Anyway – while I plot and scheme to break the laws of time and space so that I can go back in time and teach myself a lesson I won’t ever forget, you can all do something else.  What that is, I neither know, nor care.  I have complete faith in all of you to get past this difficult stage of our relationship.