Where is My Mind

Memories are like snippets of film from a movie shown completely out of order and in which the same people play all different roles. At one point, she’s with you in Baltimore and then inexplicably, you see her in the hallway outside of the Wilshire office where you pay to get the boot off your car. She’s just there, smiling but bewildered. People get stuck in our memories. There’s a girl from high school that is forever attached to the act of tuning a guitar. Her name was Renee Souther and she was just a beautiful and kind girl from my senior class. I didn’t even know her particularly well and never played the guitar around her. And yet, every time I turn a machine head, I see her smile in the haze. And what’s more, she’s in the liminal space of an empty classroom of some forgotten elementary school where I painted gym floors during one hot summer vacation job. It’s like little lines of whatever it is memory is made of get crossed and tangled and are forever fixed. So many twigs and branches and bark from a lifetime trapped in amber.

I’m sitting here trying to sort out these little piles of life that I’ve managed to hold on to. It seems the only real proof of existence is our memories. And these are fluid at best. How much of my life do I actually remember? Ten percent? Five? I think it’s closer to one percent or less. So much of my life is completely and forever unaccounted for and what remains is all tangled up. It occurs to me to try harder. To pay more attention. To try and be in the business of making memories.

What started out as a simple return of a text on Monday night has turned into something altogether different. The impulse to share the memories connected to a few Violent Femme lyrics a friend had sent me has taken on an almost frantic air. How much of my life have I forgotten? What happened to me? What happened to us, to them, to all those things that seemed so important so long ago. I think this, this thing I’m creating, this thing you’re reading, is an attempt at trying to regain life. Not relive it but retrieve it from some vault that seems to require a whole lot of effort to unlock.

I started with songs. I started with something that was precious to me and looked for what they were connected to. These songs I’ve used are little pins in the map of my life. The hold up faintly scribbled and boldly Sharpied Post-it notes which form a life. I see my life like the whiteboard in the detective office with pieces of yarn stretched between so many photos of criminals. Just trying to see what connects and what sort of order my life has had. The songs help. I remember where I was at precisely the moment I first heard “Where is my Mind?” and during the same memory first heard the Paris Texas soundtrack. I can prove this little part of my life exists because of the attachment to these two pieces of music. And still, it’s such a tangled memory. I know I was working on some video in some desert far from LA. I remember driving a car which wasn’t mine back to set. Or back to the hotel. I just remember sitting with my hands on the wheel and the presence of a cassette tape sitting next to me on the bench seat.

My memories are always in second person. My point of view is from over my right shoulder looking at the seat and the cassette. I move up to see this overwhelmingly beautiful and iridescent sunset looming over the vast stretch of the desert. There will never be a moment like this again I thought. I say it out loud, “Look because you’ll never be here in this moment ever again.” I say it to Camera-me as he’s looking over the shoulder but the Camera-me can’t respond. It can only try and keep up and document. “Remember this moment and try and pay attention.” I tell Camera-me. “The day will come when you’ll pay everything you have to be here again for even a one minute. For even a second. Pay attention. Please.” And so, it does. The camera mind looks out and pans across the scene seeing the far-off colors coalescing in the evening and the near-field detail of the car antenna and imitation wood paneling of the front doors. It captures how preposterously flat this world can be in places. Nothing is as high in the air as I am for hundreds of miles around and I’m hovering maybe four feet above the road. The asphalt of the state highway glides next to the sand of the desert as we drive…perfectly… lubricating each other. Zero friction. Camera-Mike tries to get as much as possible in one master shot but the scene switches to the stereo with my right hand pulling away as the click of the mechanism and the soft spring-loaded collapse of the cassette slot door do their thing. They have parts in this movie as much as anything. I can see the movement and the sound of the tape right before any recorded music plays. Future me…Now me is trying to find more footage.

  Look, there are three of us. Three different Me’s. One the subject of the memory. Another the recorder of the memory and me, here now, the one who is trying to cobble it all together for us.

“Ooooooooooooooooooooooooh!stop” That’s what comes from the stereo and into my memory. It’s not something you can’t pay attention to. Immediately followed by a sharp little “aight!” Maybe someone is saying “alright” maybe someone has just been pinched and is yelping. Whatever I hear it is the very first time I’ve ever heard The Pixies and this song, “Where Is My Mind”

At this point I beg of you to find and listen to The Pixies “Where is my Mind?” Go here now: https://youtu.be/49FB9hhoO6c

As you listen, consider this: this moment happened. Somewhere and at a certain point in 1987 or 1988, in the early evening hours in a California desert, I was here doing this and you were somewhere else doing something else. Maybe you were giving birth. Maybe you were driving home from work ruminating over some turn of phrase you uttered and regret. Maybe you were giddy with the love of her. Or him. Maybe you were hearing The Pixies for the very first time too! But this moment happened, and I have a shaky 16mm account of it which has to last me the rest of my life.

The acoustic guitar strums in and shimmers around the sunset. From somewhere off on the right, long, long miles away, the lone vocal comes out from the backseat speakers.”Ooooh oooh” a first note and a single half-step down for the second. Plaintive. Mournful. Hovering above the song like a duende. This thing is full of duende. The little ghost that lives in the dark notes but is responsible for all of the beauty. Camera-me films me looking out through the windshield knowing this is a special moment. I’m struck dumb by how different this sounds from what I expected. I expected crap. Discarded cassettes in other peoples’ cars are always crap. Whose car was this?? How am I even in it?? I never found out and if I did, I didn’t pay attention. It’s gone forever. Someone did me a huge favor. If you’re out there I hope you have armies of people to love.

Fast forward the video to 0:13. It’s video now. We can move it back and forth to be sure of things and one thing is for sure and that is that the drums which Albini captured pound in like a little brother tapping your head with a hammer until you wake up! Wake up! boom, booM, boom, bOOM, BOOM, BOOM! It all falls into a groove and Camera-me films me silent and stunned. “With your feet on the air and your head on the ground. Try this trick and spin it, yeah” I heard it but didn’t hear it. It washed over me. But the voice! Alternating between some bipolar mania and flatlined catatonia. Back and forth. Back and forth “Your head’ll collapse if there's nothing in it and you'll ask yourself…where is my mind?”

This is what this is all about. Where is my mind? Where are my memories? What have I done with them?

I’ve been listening to this song for hours on repeat. I’ve been trying to exact every microsecond of memory I can pull from that moment. That night. There are scenes of a cheap motel room full of beer-drinking PAs with walkies charging next to one of the beds. There’s a shot of me crawling into the interior of the car to adjust something for camera. There’s the vague knowledge that I heard Ry Cooder slide his way into my soul with the Paris Tx soundtrack as it also appeared before me in that mysterious car in that opalescent desert on that long ago but atomic bomb of a moment that I’m so desperately trying to remember with more detail than I seem to be able to. Please God, just a little more.

These things happened. They count. They are a part of my life. Hearing a song from a band that I don’t even particularly care about anymore rivals all the big moments. Hearing that first Oooooohstop! in that perfect desert light on that perfect desert night compares with World Series ending outs. Compares to the first shot. The first “yes” she ever said to me. It compares to every scene of sadness and heartbreak and sheer relief. It compares to my Father taking his last breath in my arms. Fuck! Jesus Christ…fuck.

Memories are all I have left from whatever life I’ve led. At least, that’s all I seem to have. I want more. I want to keep looking. I want to be in the business of making memories.