It's Beginning to and Back again

I've been back from SE Asia for a month now. Back in clusterfuck Los Angeles, the woolybully, local-slo-motion of Long Beach. According to a podcast of WNYC's radiolab I just listened to our memories are actually physical manifestations, a construction of proteins. Scientists agree that filing cabinets are terrible metaphors for the mechanism of memories. The act of remembering is an act of recreation, there is no pristine, endlessly retrievable databank. When we remember we reconstruct, an intepolation of things past, calling into play the vagaries of the senses and the imagination, so that with every act of recollection, the original experience is changed irretrievably

At the snout end of this year of the pig, when I was in the Philippines for a month and a half, I brought with me Proust's Swan's Way, an old linen-bound, yellowing, edition that I had picked up from the Oakland library's downtown book store. I packed this brick of a book, thinking that in my forced convalescence I would finally get through it (so I could read onward--I've been trying to learn delayed gratification-- to the books with the S and M that Maria told me existed.) I managed to read most of the book, but with a fevered incomprehension, having long since discovered that only a certain clarity of prose and the assistance of caffeine or nicotine leads to that optimal comprehension and retention, like watching an engrossing spot of television.

Did you know that Proust was a neuroscientist?

Now at the fulcrum of the year, the lowest point of the belly of the year of the pig, I will try to retrieve from across the ocean of water and time, some things both ghastly and wonderful that bear repeating, things that maybe I tried to record in my notebooks, almost illegible scrawls mostly reading things like: this fucken sucks or it was alright. I remember it like it was right now.