Another Rant

[Sister Fracture]

Cherished Memories or I get why some people go nuts with home videos, now.

What's your most cherished memory? Pick one, go on. I'll wait. Got one? Okay. What do you remember about it? Not a lot, I'll bet, not in any tactile way, particularly if it's been a while since you've done something similar. Oh sure, you know it happened or was real, but the weight of it, anything that made it seem more substantial, is gone now, or near gone.

Do you remember the exact flavor of your favorite dish the first time you had it? I bet you don't if you haven't had it the same way again. Do you remember how soft your now-dead first dog/cat/other pet's whatever was? The precise sounds they made? The way they smelled?

I bet you don't. I bet you can't remember the smell of your first lover, how they felt snuggled up against you, the way they looked at you, the words they said to you that made the world seem okay. And you won't, ever again, if you're even the least bit lucky, because God help you if you get even the slightest reminder but have no way of knowing if you'll ever get that feeling again.

Of course, the first few tears might seem like a relief, having only offered and experienced surface emotion for fuck knows how long, at least where no one else could see, and you can't remember the last time you felt so human, having been an automaton to keep people thinking you're "okay" and "like you used to be." Everyone knows that everyone feels things, but don't show it too much, because nobody wants to hang around with someone who thinks it's a natural thing to do.

Look here, you. I have something to say about this. It SUCKS. Big time. But you know what? It's not as though there's no point to living, because while you're having fun, while you're really LIVING, you have your soul in hand. That's more than most people can say. So don't be passive, waiting for opportune moments to just show up on your doorstep. That'll just leave you with fewer memories, and all degraded past the point that you just know it happened.

[The Wizard]

Shit. My hat is off to you, Sister.

Beautiful work.

[Precious Moments Zalgo]

What's your most cherished memory? Pick one, go on. I'll wait. Got one? Okay. What do you remember about it? Not a lot, I'll bet, not in any tactile way, particularly if it's been a while since you've done something similar. Oh sure, you know it happened or was real, but the weight of it, anything that made it seem more substantial, is gone now, or near gone.

That's not true for me.  I remember it like it was today, even though it was more than four years ago.  I'm probably atypical though, in that I think about it every single day.

And you won't, ever again, if you're even the least bit lucky, because God help you if you get even the slightest reminder but have no way of knowing if you'll ever get that feeling again.

You got that right.  In the words of Mojo Nixon, "Don't ask me why I drink.  The reason's worse than you think."

Even so, I would rather have the memories than not have them.

Of course, the first few tears might seem like a relief, having only offered and experienced surface emotion for fuck knows how long, at least where no one else could see, and you can't remember the last time you felt so human, having been an automaton to keep people thinking you're "okay" and "like you used to be." Everyone knows that everyone feels things, but don't show it too much, because nobody wants to hang around with someone who thinks it's a natural thing to do.

That's true.  They'll put up with it for a while, but after whatever time people think is reasonable, the mask has to go on.

Look here, you. I have something to say about this. It SUCKS. Big time. But you know what? It's not as though there's no point to living, because while you're having fun, while you're really LIVING, you have your soul in hand. That's more than most people can say. So don't be passive, waiting for opportune moments to just show up on your doorstep. That'll just leave you with fewer memories, and all degraded past the point that you just know it happened.

I like this song a lot.  It's a good, angry song about loss and grief.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I bet you don't. I bet you can't remember the smell of your first lover, how they felt snuggled up against you,

Wrong.  Once in a while, I pass a woman that smells like my first girl, and it fucking floors me, 27 years later.

[Sister Fracture]

I bet you don't. I bet you can't remember the smell of your first lover, how they felt snuggled up against you,

Wrong.  Once in a while, I pass a woman that smells like my first girl, and it fucking floors me, 27 years later.

I thought of that while I was typing. It's easier to remember a thing when you have something to remember with.

I had this dream a few years back, and there was this cologne smell in it. I can't remember what it smells like right now, because there's nothing to help me remember. But when I pass some guy who's wearing it, I get a kick inna face from my memory.

That's just an example, though.

[Adios]

Some memories will never die.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Beautifully-written piece.

Mr. Language and I were talking about memory last night, because I have an issue with the description of memories "fading". What I learned is that not everyone remembers in the same way.

For me, if I remember, I remember like it just happened. The ones that remain don't fade, but many memories just vanish. I can look inside my head and see the contents of my closet in Oakland in 1994. I can smell the breath of the first man I fell in love with, and feel his skin and his body as clearly as I can feel the good-bye kiss from this morning.

But what's gone is gone, and someone describing a shared experience that has vanished from my mind won't bring any part of it back.

[Phox]

Cherished Memories or I get why some people go nuts with home videos, now.

What's your most cherished memory? Pick one, go on. I'll wait. Got one? Okay. What do you remember about it? Not a lot, I'll bet, not in any tactile way, particularly if it's been a while since you've done something similar. Oh sure, you know it happened or was real, but the weight of it, anything that made it seem more substantial, is gone now, or near gone.

Do you remember the exact flavor of your favorite dish the first time you had it? I bet you don't if you haven't had it the same way again. Do you remember how soft your now-dead first dog/cat/other pet's whatever was? The precise sounds they made? The way they smelled?

I bet you don't. I bet you can't remember the smell of your first lover, how they felt snuggled up against you, the way they looked at you, the words they said to you that made the world seem okay. And you won't, ever again, if you're even the least bit lucky, because God help you if you get even the slightest reminder but have no way of knowing if you'll ever get that feeling again.

Of course, the first few tears might seem like a relief, having only offered and experienced surface emotion for fuck knows how long, at least where no one else could see, and you can't remember the last time you felt so human, having been an automaton to keep people thinking you're "okay" and "like you used to be." Everyone knows that everyone feels things, but don't show it too much, because nobody wants to hang around with someone who thinks it's a natural thing to do.

Look here, you. I have something to say about this. It SUCKS. Big time. But you know what? It's not as though there's no point to living, because while you're having fun, while you're really LIVING, you have your soul in hand. That's more than most people can say. So don't be passive, waiting for opportune moments to just show up on your doorstep. That'll just leave you with fewer memories, and all degraded past the point that you just know it happened.

[BadBeast]

Smell is the big trigger for memories. Especially long ago memories. A smell can take you back farther than anything else, farther than photographs, or video can.  All you have to do to demonstrate this to yourself, is walk through an empty school. It doesn't have to be the school you went to, (although that would obviously have more secondary triggers) and it's more than just the lingering aroma of what was served in the cafeteria the day before, it's a subtle, certain smell, peculiar to schools. It's hard to actually pin down to any mixture of flavours, or aromas, but it's very different from a similar building like a Hospital. It doesn't  trigger memories of particular events, but it floods us with feelings and nostalgia It takes us back, to a time in our heads, rather than any physical place.   

That smell, is the smell of childhood. Our own childhood. It takes us right back to when we were living in a different, simpler world. Experiencing stuff for the first time maybe. Setting many of the patterns that we are still unconsciously following, right up until today. Only we've been following them for so long now, that we forget what it was like to be still working out what was what in the world. Even if we didn't have a particularly easy time of it, there's still that nostalgia for the newness of it all, resonating right through whatever we were thinking about five seconds ago.
Just shut your eyes, and you're almost right back there.

  Then you can almost pick out separate smells, triggered by the rush of long buried feelings. The floor polish, the school dinners, not the ones that were cooked yesterday, or last week, but the ones that were cooked when you were 8 years old. Cabbage, boiled to limp seaweed consistency,  Minced beef, and potatoes, special school dinner gravy. All good, wholesome stuff. 
And lurking just behind everything, the acrid edge of the jeyes fluid that always masked the smell of puke, or piss  that's always inevitable when three or four hundred kids, ages six to eleven spend seven hours a day, getting socialised, infecting each other with stomach bugs, measles,  mumps, whatever childhood ailments were going round.  They were all there in spades, toughening up our little immune systems. And all this, in two or three breaths. Amazing really, all that jumble of seven year old's perception of the world, rising up out of nowhere. Just from a smell.

When my firstborn was teething, the Doctor gave us a bottle of Gripe Water in an attempt to stop him howling like a banshee all night, and as soon as I took off the screwcap, the smell of it took me right back to the last time I had smelled it. Which must have been when I was teething myself. Not actual memories, because babies don't have a solid frame of reference with which to store experiences as memories, but the memory of what it felt to smell the stuff for the first time. Such a familiar smell, buried for nearly a quarter of a century under fucktons of whatever day to day irrelevances I'd piled on top of it. And all there, but totally forgotten forever, had it not been for a chance encounter with the same smell.
Thinking about it now, I can remember the taste of the pink baby medicine they used to dish out to mothers back then as well. Paracetamol, I suppose, but the flavouring they used in it, I only ever tasted in that baby med.  And this was all from before I was even one year old.
Without those smell triggers, there would be absolutely no chance of dredging something up from that long ago, no chance at all.. 

I remember well the first girl I ever had sex with. A bit of a Hippy, I remember, distinctly her peculiar scent of fresh girl sweat, patchouli joss sticks, consulate cigarettes, and scrumpy cider.
All individual smells that I'm not particularly enamored by, but the mix of them all, would be a heady rush indeed, if ever I were to smell that combination again.
But far more potent and evocative than this, by a magnitude unmeasurable, the smell that really knocks me flat, as if someone had got my heart in their clenched fist, then suddenly squeezed it tightly, is the smell of the girl who first let me have the run of her fresh young naked flesh for my playground. I must have been just thirteen, and she was fourteen. There is no other smell to describe it with, it was the pungency of the first bursting of her lusty sex girlsmell, like a pure, yellowish orangy pastel smell.

I can only think of it in terms of colours, because I suppose it's the scent that everything I've ever smelled since then has been referenced against. If I lived to be two hundred years old, and was on my deathbed, seconds away from shuffling off this mortal coil for good, and the merest hint of that scent were to drift across my aged hairy nostrils, I swear, I would be up out of that bed, impending death postponed, with an erection like a horny teenager! That's how powerful that one particular smell can be. Dok touched on it nicely, in this thread, a particular perfume, that can poleaxe a grown man from the one side of a crowded busy stinky fume filled street, to the other.  And that's just a perfume!

I tell you now, in no sense of exaggeration, If you could bottle the clean fresh, first natural pressing of young Miss Decaney's sweet, blooming youthful fecundity, then you would have the Alchemist's secret elixir of eternal and everlasting youth. This is the philosopher's stone, Ambrosia, Soma, The stuff that the Gods consumed, the stuff that gave them the first inkling that they even were Gods! I have only ever dreamed of that Deific, magical smell since then, waking with just the hint of a  memory, but knowing in the very bones of me that it's probably one of the most potent things I've ever had the privilege to feel.
So ITT,  I can most Biblically TestIfy, with my hand, on my aching balls, that it was real, and something much more than just a young boy's first euphoric whiff of sweet poon tang.

I'd better start to wind it down a bit it here, for fear of sounding like some filthy old perv, lusting after some teenage girly's damp otter's nose, but I swear it's nothing like that. It's not even really anything to do with sex, because I didn't actually have sex with her. (Well, not until a good few years after the events I've just described, and by then, she smelled very different)
           
But if I hadn't had that heady potent burst of 'whoomph'  filling my lungs, and fuelling my first, teenage rutting rush, it would be comparable to never having seen colour in my whole life, and never missing it, because I didn't even know what colour was. I'd probably trade off twenty years of my life, just to have those three of four months to live over again. And still feel like I'd had the better part of the bargain!  In fact,  just recounting this here, today, I feel ten years younger!  Perhaps it's the imperceptable shift of Winter, beginning to inch it's way towards Spring, or perhaps it's the deranged ramblings of an overimaginative mind, edging it's way towards senility, (where the fuck did that come from!)   But I know what I think. That certain smells, like the one I described, or the first smell of smoke as danger perhaps, are much more than just fucking smells! 

So bask in the glory, that is BadBeast, being the young Stag again ITT!

Another one springs to mind now, on this re-write.  So you're getting this one as well.                                       
       When I first started smoking Pot, there was a lot of cheap, Red Lebanese Hash around. It wasn't Mindblowing Hippy making Psychedelic brain mushingly strong. Far from it, it was pretty low grade, but clean, and well pressed. It came in nine ounce bars, always wrapped up in cheesecloth.
But it had a very distinctive and evocative smell. Earthy, and wholesome, in fact, the smell was redder than the Hashish. A red ochre smell, the colour of red clay earthenware plant pots.Now, I collected the muslin cheescloth wrappings for about a year, and got a girlfriend to sew it into a shirt for me

Now,  I say "shirt", in the loosest possible meaning of the word.
      To anyones eye today, it would just seem like some stanky, filthy, stained rag, (Which, I make no bones about admitting, it was) something fallen off the end of some window cleaner's ladder. But Man, the smell of that shirt! It fucking reeked of Red Leb. And all that summer, by default, so did I. It was just about the best Summer of my life. 1984, So fuck your Orwellian Doomsayers, fuck Thatcher, Big Brother was more like "Little Sister" that Summer! 
It was the last Stonehenge free festival, five weeks of beautiful sunny weather. Woodsmoke, and reefer, and a diet of Pot noodles, and the last of  the legendary "Operation Julie" microdot acid. There was no sense of urgency at all, just a fuckton of LSD that had to be gobbled up before the next Fezzy. And when you're young and full of  beans, you like to help out, to do your bit. It would have been rude not to.

Anyway, that's all another story, so  back to the shirt. By the beginning of November, It was falling apart! Bwaaah, I needed a new shirt. But the smell! I was as rank as a Daddy Polecat, from living on site all summer, as crusty as a Cavalier's codpiece. But The smell of that Lebanese shirt stays like young Bexy's magickal sexsweat!  It's rare now to ever see Red Leb, but I always smell it before I see it! From a long way away as well. It's not as magical a smell as Bex, or the Shirt, but it does that reboot thing in my head, and for a moment or two, there is nothing else but pure feeling, reminding me of what's really what.
But my original point, in this thread, was that smells, are the Guardians of memory. And certain smells, are Godlike in their ability to unlock places we thought were gone forever. Just for a few seconds, here and there, maybe a couple of dozen times in a lifetime. But that's all it takes. Like a Lodestone, they can realign you to a course you'd been imperceptively
drifting away from, for years. In a breath or two. Now that's pretty fucking awesome teamwork by brain, nose, and spirit, and the knowledge of it even happening at all, helps keep me optomistic through these inescapable, (but not written in stone) Dark Endtimes. 






         


                                             

[Adios]

BB, I love to read you stuff, but my condition requires white space. I tried 4 times with massive fail.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

BB, it would help if you broke that up with some paragraphs.  It's good stuff, but hard to read in that format.

[BadBeast]

Sorry peeps, I'll re-do it. Should have done it on a document first really, but when you get on a roll, . . . . back with a readable copy as soon as.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I have a very strong olfactory sense, but my girl L has no sense of smell at all. I wonder if that affects her memory.

[BadBeast]

I think it possibly could, but not the day to day, surface or intellectual memory, because thats sequentially linked by experience and logical skills. Smell only seems to interrupt this sequencing when there might be something you are missing, that needs your immediate attention. Like your seat is on fire, or you smell food, and remember the Pizza you put in the oven. Like a back-up set of executable files in case you're somehow incapacitated. The reason smell triggers those early memories, is because your experience didn't have any other sequential or temporal events to link it too. Then as you get older, and more stuff happens to you, the more accessible logical system is used, because it has more events to link each new event to, and can extrapolate more accurately because all these events add up to experience.
The thing I would maybe be a bit concerned about, is the unconscious pheremonal cues that we (supposedly) get from
other people. I know it might be overstated, and superfluous in modern man, but it's worth looking into. My stepfather has no sense of smell, but he doesn't ever seem to have missed it. He didn't even mention it to my Mum, until she commented on his lack of smell, after 15 years of marriage. (She gave up smoking for about a week, then when she couldn't hack it, started again and didn't tell him then noticed he couldn't smell the smoke anyway) He's not got any memory troubles, was a Colonel in the Army, until he retired, but he's never been very demonstrative, or shown much imagination. But that's probably more due to being a repressed 1930's baby, and unimaginative,  because an Army Career didn't exactly encourage any imaginative ideas.  But his social skills are fairly normal,and he's very organised, if a little routine based. And the house is fitted with fire detectors, so if it caught on fire, he'd be able to hear it,  before he choked on smoke he can't smell. Sometimes Anosmia suddenly corrects itself, and people who didn't even know they had it, are able to smell. This freaks them out and they go the Doctor, trying to describe a new sense, as symptomatic, and sudden. "Oh no, don't worry, that's just your sense of smell kicking in" 
Can she smell burning at all, or vapourising salts? Because I'm not sure, but  I think anosmia can sometimes be shocked into correction, with a sensory overload like ammonia fumes swamping her olfactory nerve endings. Try a bit of cotton wool with ammonia on it, when she's sleeping, under her nose. If she wakes up, you'll have cured her! If not, well, it's not the end of the World. Weird really, because there's a lot of research goes into the other senses, if you're blind or deaf, or dumb, they've got all sorts of contingency plans,but say you're Anosmic, and people just smile blankly, and nod.   

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

Payne has no sense o smell. It makes me sad that he cant smell stuff sometimes.