Brokenheartsville

You ever go through this point in time when you have all this stuff piled up around you and you can’t make heads nor tails of any of it but you still dug through it all anyway and you know you enjoyed it but you have no clue what any of it was? Or maybe this is just a flashback to the years of drugs and alcohol that flowed through my life…

Or something…

Yeah, I had a moment today where I went through all the stuff I have done in younger days and I think to a comment made about comparing some things in my life to the hedonistic lifestyle of a beat poet. The comment was, “they wouldn’t have stopped.”

So I have all this stuff in my life that has built up and rampaged through and I don’t remember much of it. Not because I was blissed out or lost to alcohol and drugs and what not, but because it was all a blur. I mean, you’ve felt that at times right? I mean seriously, I don’t remember much of the 90s or the 00s. Both of those decades seem to be a blur in my memory.

And for the life of me, I don’t even know what sent me down this spiral to try and remember them. Is it my age and the direction my life has gone and I want to reclaim something of my life? Or is it just a general curiosity that I want piece together the years and know where I came from? These are the burning questions I live through.

We have these artifacts in our lives as mementos to remind us of where we have been. Think of them as breadcrumbs that will lead us back to those places we once visited. Yet still, our life blurs at the edges and we don’t have a clue from the passing moments.

I dare say that this was hammered into my psyche this week when I went through several days with a song stuck in my head. Joe Nichols’ Brokenheartsville. Sure, I like the song, but not something I listen to on my own. Hell, I actually have the album the song came from in my music collection. But this is one of my wife’s things (she likes country music and I tolerate it. There are some singers I like but it doesn’t fit in my regular listening mix).

The crazy thing about that is, I hadn’t been directly listening to music in a number of days. Most of what I had playing had been ambient sounds, stuff like rain and thunderstorms or my recent favorite, the sounds heard when riding on a train. So where this one had come from, I had no idea. I had certain lyrics stuck in my head and the tune, though at the time I couldn’t place the singer. It dominated my mental soundtrack when I woke up for several days. I’ve had to listen to it a few times now to exorcise the demons and free me from the mental prison.

But that’s the thing, right? We get these blitzed images of our past that play over and over again in our minds and we can’t really put our finger on the trigger that brought them out. It’s been the same thing with a book I remember reading when I was in the Marines. I read it a couple times even. Though I couldn’t remember the title or who wrote it, I knew moments in the book because they had stayed with me like I had lived the experiences.

Ya know, I have no idea where I was going with this. Not a clue. But I put it out there so maybe it connects us in some warped and demented way. And maybe, just maybe, if you lived them, you can remember what happened in the 90s or the 00s. Still, just a blur for me.

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