Old Haunts

Lately, I've been thinking about the things that haunt us--songs that get stuck in our heads long after the actual track's stopped playing, scary scenes that keep us from sleep days after we've left the cinema or that tooth your tongue still looks for despite said tooth having been pulled out months ago.

 Last Monday, I was hanging out with my friend Ron and we were trying to remember his wifi password; after a couple of attempts, he was finally able to get it down just right. He told me that theoretically, our minds retain everything we encounter; but to be able to function properly, our conscious mind just puts everything in storage. If we wanted (or tried hard enough), we could dig it all up and recall almost anything. I learned this back during my majors, as well--certain information is there pretty much forever, all you need is the right trigger to pull it to the forefront of your mind.

The other night, I had a dream about an old friend of mine. I haven't talked to this person in years and in my dream, we were lying in a strawberry field, talking. Despite not having been in the presence of this person in years, in the dream the "friend" talked and laughed and joked around with "me" in a way I didn't even remember I remembered. 

How much is up there that we don't want to remember? How do we keep from having it jump out at us and "ruin everything"? A lot of the time, I suspect that there is no such thing as the freedom of choice--how can there be when we can't even control ourselves? How can we say that we choose this or that when we don't even know truly what it is we're basing our decisions on?

A lot of the time we use the present to justify the past--"if that didn't happen, this wouldn't have happened"--and more and more I'm starting to think that justification is a load of crap. Gaining one thing doesn't mitigate the loss of another because different things mean different things to us, in different ways. I don't think it'd be right to say that a baby being born makes someone else's death less grave. How do we mourn loss, then? How do we find redemption when the very fact that we are in a state of mourning for something or someone already means that we in fact, could not find redemption for that situation?

Beats me.

As I could not--cannot--come up with answers for these things that've been on my mind as of late, I instead decided to record a "duet" of sorts with one of my favorite bands, ever. This song's been haunting me too, recently so I decided to record an additional backing vocal to this awesome acoustic version of this I found online. Music (or art, in general) doesn't solve anything, but I find that it makes things bearable. And so we go on.

You said it was not inside my heart, it was.
You said it should tear a kid apart, it does.