Warm Recollections #30
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
Those songs you hear when you’re young which you know are truly about how love is, before you’ve ever even been in love. The ones where there’s something you can nearly touch, something hidden between the music and the lyrics which tells you the person who wrote it knows something, knows things you’re about to find out. Songs which structure your understanding of love when love is still something you only feel for your parents and your pet — and don’t yet realize what a tricky, dark, failing and vicious fucker it can be; when you have yet to learn that love may come in a pretty box but can be a chemical weapon for the soul.
I am convinced that women remember their early childhood better than men. Why would that be?
Two septuagenarians — a couple — arguing quietly but intensely in a bar. Sounding not very different to people in their 40s or 30s. God, how depressing. Does age give you nothing? Not even bitter, past-it-all silences?
A noisy, large, exuberant male child: puberty hits him like a truck. He will never again be so noisy in public, unless with his friends, or when a little drunk watching the ball game. Otherwise he becomes affable and slightly awkward and a little lost. Adulthood doesn’t suit everyone.
Pointlessly doing tasks on a new computer, just to savor how much faster it is than the old one.
As always, if you can think of anyone who might enjoy this Substack, please spread the word.
“I am convinced that women remember their early childhood better than men. Why would that be?” Couple of hypotheses - women are the lore-keepers, the bearers of familial wisdom; women keep receipts! ; women will hold things against you and carry grudges for a lifetime. This may, of course, just be me.
“ Songs which structure your understanding of love when love is still something you only feel for your parents and your pet — and don’t yet realize what a tricky, dark, failing and vicious fucker it can be; when you have yet to learn that love may come in a pretty box but can be a chemical weapon for the soul.” My god, how true. The pretty pop songs about love of a type that never happened for me. The tortured wailing-guitar laments of how wounding it can be, and the gut-punch of regret or betrayal or leaving in the night…. Playing the song that found your middle C of emotion over and over until the neighbours bang on the wall… Hearing a particular song decades later and worlds away when not even the cells in your brain are the same ones you had back when it mean everything, and having to flee the store, trolley abandoned in the aisle…