When I worked in an office back in America, I felt like it was my duty to use these eight hours of darkness I had each day to listen to new music.
The lot I've been given! To listen to all the world's music and place it in some kind of mental categorization scheme, impossible to communicate to any other sentient being!
Now I listen to nothing new. This week, I just played the song Memories by Zazen Boys over and over.
Memories! He knows my memories!
When I wake up at 6am and feel the pressing need to go outside, to go anywhere at all that isn't my own home, I pass by the grey-haired men on the sidewalk, torn apart by repeated construction and deconstruction. I scream those same words at them:
"I know you! I know your memories!"
You think I don't know -- but I do! I was there, crouched down in front of you, licking the tears from your stubbly cheeks -- and you think I don't know!
The song works out perfectly. Despite not liking Number Girl very much, I felt obligated to listen to those four albums of theirs repeatedly back when I was at the memory-forming age -- the age when human bodies could so effortlessly slip into my nightmares, sacrificing their physical form in this material world of ours in exchange for the ability to threaten me in my dreams each night, decades later.
"I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled...!" as our friend T.S. Eliot once said.
I had not the energy to listen to Zazen Boys back then. They seemed like a dumb joke, and I had no patience for jokes.
It was only last year...
My friend Balckwell's earnestness infected me...
Viruses replicating inside of me...
The road to Cat Town -- he wrote about it, and I wanted to visit that road too.
It's such a pity... The Days of NEKOMACHI, as a song, isn't quite my thing.
The Days of NEKOMACHI appears on Zazen Boys I, which is where I dutifully began listening. I used to listen to discographies in a day. It took me a year to work my way up to Zazen Boys IV -- though when you recognize that it took the band 8 years to get there, a year seems like fine progress. They did all the hard-work for me.
Memories begins in my present world, and then it returns to that old world -- that world where I kept listening to Number Girl in hopes of entering other people's souls... souls closed off to me forever!
Maybe such a contrast, the instantaneous journey, crystallized in this song, from the Zazen Boys sound back to the Number Girl sound -- maybe it is more meaningful to the man who had to claw these sounds out of his own heart, than it is to me, he who has not worked a day in his life.
Not a single day!
I wish I could share this song with you. I wish I had something of my own to give you, but all I have is this song. Even as I listen to it now, a dog chokes on his own saliva in rhythm with the drums.
Why must you be the only one whose memories I cannot know? Why can't I hear your screams? Why can't you hear mine?
Memories...