Balls and Walnuts
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Thirteen Ephemeral Thoughts
For several months, I’ve thought of doing this Thirteen, but it’s a treacherous theme. It’s not as bad as “Thirteen Things I Forgot,” but it’s close.
These are memories which flit into my skull unbidden. They usually have no relationship to the moment; I’m not getting food memories when I’m hungry, nothing that comprehensible. I suspect a mild case of temporal lobe epilepsy.
The only way I can write this is incrementally. Just as I cannot induce these memories, I usually can’t remember them for very long, either — until they come again. And they do. My memory is a vinyl record with more skips than music.
Let’s allow this one to grow over the course of the day. I’ll add to the post when the memories occur, so it may take me a while to reach thirteen. Onward!
1. Rain on the roof of my boyhood home. You know those CDs they sell that have nothing but rainstorm noise, to help you get to sleep? That’s what this was like. I’ve lived in more than a few places since then (didn’t I do a Thirteen on that a few weeks ago?) and none of them had quite the same acoustic property. Back then, it was a soothing sound, soporific. Nowadays, it keeps me up.
2. Vinegar in the trunk. For the rehearsal dinner prior to our wedding, I figured that I could prepare better food than whatever restaurant my meager budget would allow. We fixed dinner at my in-law’s house. Many of Karen’s relatives came by with sushi and manju and various other tasty treats. I barbecued filet mignon, and for the chicken-lovers, I made an adobo. That’s what spilled in the trunk of my Plymouth Champ, and I never could get the smell out of that car. Or out of my mind, apparently.
3. The Fallopian staircase — Latimer Commons, UC Berkeley. Wish I had a picture for you, but you’ll have to use your imagination.
4. My my my my my my, this is turning into a sucky Thirteen.
Remember: no comment, no lurve. Life is a give-and-take.
Carrie: I love you, too. Don’t tell your husband.
Apparently Crystal doesn’t consider Balls and Walnuts an inspirational blog. You mean cleavage and cameltoe photos don’t get your devotional juices flowing?
Darla accedes to my demands for more skin 🙂
Dan feels a touch of schadenfreude
microsoar’s trip to the fish-n-chippery
I thought Shaina was apologizing to me, until she said “I have had impure thoughts about your bf”
Lyvvie has seen the light of WordPress
Kate’s butt grows and grows (hey, she said it, I’m just repeating)
Dean, I cry foul. #5 and #6 are definitely related.
D.
Right now, it’s a Thursday 1. Happy Thursday 1!
Hi Doug. Sorry I haven’t been visiting for a while. I’ve been kind of down lately and the blog has taken on a life of its own, veering to the weirdly catholic fringe …. so nothing much worth sharing. I hope all’s well with you.
And now it’s a Thursday 3!
Crystal, sorry about the smart-assed question (above). It’s the devil in me 😉
Interesting, isn’t it, how sometimes the most mundane things leave the strongest memories?
Nice idea–good luck making all 13!
I’m glad I don’t give in to these memes. I got nothing.
That doesn’t excuse you from posting no.s 5-9
i havent done a TT in a long time. i need to get on that. next week, i promise!
Thanks for the link. BTW, I tagged you with a writing-related meme. Yes, just when I said I don’t give in to memes, I hit you with one. 😉
Four? I get these random memories that pop up out of nowhere too, and a very recent one was that I had a toy as a kid that I absolutely loved, and the memory was a flash of me bouncing on my green inchworm and trying to remove his hat at the same time. Do you remember those toys? I have no clue why my brain decided to share that memory with me, but it was nice.
You want suck? I did a list of thirteen completely unrelated things. Ironic, considering what I do for a living, what?
the problem with ephemeral moments is that describing them stomps all over their nature.
What you need is thirteen things about some sort of animals. Like Dogs. They don’t do ephemeral thangs. They roll in cat shit. Both dogs in my house have shit all over them this morning. It’s raining (cats and dogs! that’s how the shit got out back) but the dogs are still locked out. Maybe a neighbor will call the SPCA. Maybe they’ll give those losers a bath.
Nothing fleeting about these moments.
I asked Karen to do next week’s Thirteen. She has been watching Once Upon a Time in the West (over and over again), listening to the commentary on the DVD, reading up on it, etc. Why? The monomaniacal obsessions of the ultra-bright, I guess.
No doubt she’ll write her Thirteen about dogs.
I wonder if kids remember rain sounds on the roof because we spent a lot of time trying to fall asleep in the dark. I don’t even know what the rain sounds like in my current house (where I only lived as an adult, with children) because when I lie down, I’m asleep. But I bet my son does.
Kate, them’s fleeting moments. In your old age you’ll look back with fondness: remember that day that the dogs rolled in cat shit? You’ll laugh.
No she won’t. She’ll still remember the smell as if it were smeared on her upper lip.
Lydia, you’re probably right. I know I spent hours in bed, lying awake, and the rain was a welcome friend.
Rain on the roof is better than squirrel in the wall any day.