So yeah, I woke up in a crispy frame of mind this morning. I had Yon Olde Earlie Shift at work, so at approximately 5:40 a.m., I hauled my butt out into the street and started pedalling. A mental rendition of “Too Drunk to Fuck” is actually not bad riding music.
I used to love AC/DC’s “Who Made Who” album for my running music. I can’t imagine how many miles that album in my Walkman carried me through. Any time I hear AC/DC nowadays, I feel like taping up my dodgy ankle and getting a few miles behind me. I should look into an ankle brace and some decent running shoes, I think. I actually do miss running, though I don’t miss fucking up my right ankle.
Yesterday, Todd and I were talking about how sometimes certain songs, or entire albums, even, can bring back very specific memories. I’m chock full of bizarre mnemonic hyperlinks relating to music, food, scents, books, even “a certain slant of light.”
When I was about 13, I took it to my head that in order to be well-read, one ought to read a great deal of canon Science Fiction, and so that was a summer of H. G. Wells, Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury. It was during that same summer that my mom, sister, and I got a mania for mangoes and would get a few mangoes on our Saturday grocery-and-errand jaunts, and slice them up for snacking after we got back home. Another of my misguided adolescent ideas was that blonde streaks in my hair would be a hot ticket to stylishness, and therefore, under the dubious tutelage of Seventeen Magazine, I painted stipes of lemon juice into my hair and went out on the front step, to read Stranger in a Strange Land, eat a sliced-up mango, and let the sun do its work on my wretched hair. So now eating mangoes on a really hot day makes me think of Stranger in a Strange Land. Convoluted, isn’t it?