How to Take a Trip Down Memory Lane (That ‘Doesn’t Involve Your Sister For Once!’)

If your mother opens her front door and accedes silent access to your room, lead Britannica to the turquoise childhood bedroom you’d been “Dave Bowman’d” 40 back into via a salvia experiment during your third UofT semester, more or less syncretizing in your sophomoric mind that one Kant takes leave of spacetime without cowering in a childhood closet for a decade’s worth of perception, intuition, and experience.

One: If she yawns at your yearbook photos, remind Brittanica that the romantic poet Robert Southey said, “Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them. ” 40 (Clarke, 1968)

Two: If she compares members of your old gang to her personal Pool of Dead-beats, offensive as this may seem, wonder if the old gang was even all that cool or if you’ve just reminiscence-bumped them up the tentpole of intrapersonal esteem. Quote from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Nostalgia becomes particularly appealing when people feel confused about their intrinsic selves or feel unable to express their intrinsic self in their current lives. […] people tend to reflect on nostalgic memories when they find themselves in situations that make it hard to know or express who they truly are.41

Three: Doodle some lifespan retrieval curves as you describe for Brittanica the Catherine dreams. “They’re rather quite rare. Once or twice a year. Grand reunions always ending in renewed estrangement. ”

Four: Tell her how the initial estrangement occurred after a series of incidents wherein you had “gone too far” 42 with mean-spirited jokes regarding Alan Raval’s concept albums, having been egocentric, labile, and prone to moodiness long before Maj cursed you.

Five: If Britannica ushers you on, iPhone record the conversation to cut down on the following day’s blogging slog. 41 (Baldwin, Biernat, & Landau, 2015) 42 (Barthelme, Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, 1981)

“Allan Raval was her guitar teacher. Prematurely bald at twenty-two. A prodigious wearer of hats. Big confident smile, give him that. Sizable centrals. You need gnashers that size to be a quality confidence man. Believed his own gimmick: now there’s the ticket to lifelong happiness. The man wrote concept albums. Honest-to-God concept albums, in Sault Sainte Marie, Britannica. One of the concept albums was called The Hydraulic Engineer Becomes an Open Channel. You might think I’m making this up. ”

Six: If Britannica yawns, perhaps involuntarily, perhaps not, speak louder and more energetically as you inform her that:

“At the hospital they referred to her decapitation as an insult. I suppose that is the forensically precise term. ” before rolling back the narrative a bit.

“Mere hours after passions enflamed between her and I, she took up with him, perhaps to generate distance before she herself could ‘go too far, ’ incestuously, that is. I’d play The Hydraulic Engineer Becomes an Open Channel on Myspace and riff on Alan’s resemblance to the iconic Mr. Clean. All this did was push her towards him. I’d later realize maybe all she needed was some accompaniment, on guitar, for her lovely singing, which could have been my role, but because of the old gang’s peer pressure I had quit guitar at thirteen. So the old gang is not without blame in all this, in the great loss of my life. ”

Seven: If Brittanica aims to bring your story to a premature conclusion by indulging in some butt-to-groin frottage, stand so that you can orate with Ciceronian invective:

“She had taken a year off school. As I was decamping for UofT, I convinced her to come with me. She could bartend and sing and make friends. We would live together. During the college years, a brother-sister living arrangement is hardly cause for suspicion. One day she agreed and kissed me as long as seemed acceptable, our standard upper- to lower-vermillion seal complete with immersive eye contact. It would all happen! On some ostensible futon we’d fall into repose as the nights grew ribald and Scott Walker sang Cossacks Are. Rather than upon repose, I had more prudently pitched her on the street-busking scene in Kensington Market. I pitched The Rex Jazz Club and The Cameron House. All of this I’d had to Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search still having a healthy market share at this time. ”

Eight: If Brittanica has removed her pyjama bottoms and is now—in what can only be perceived as self-deprecatory commentary on her inability to capture your sexual attentions—twerking, then affix her Saje sleeping mask to your own face lest you be provoked into leaving the whole sad saga of your sister Catherine’s decapitation unfinished.

“We’d picked out posters. Her picking of a Radiohead poster worried me because the conceptual works of Alan Raval were highly derivative of this group. I picked out an A Clockwork Orange poster. Funny, isn’t it Britannica, the posters we choose to define us in youth?

Nine: If high-yield sense receptors on your testicular nerve endings suggest Britannica is rubbing her breasts or butt or perhaps her forehead against them, rush past all the heartbreaking little details towards the story’s climax:

“I do regress. As August turned cold in Sault Sainte Marie, as Augusts in The Soo always have and forever will, amidst these melancholic pines, it would happen. She would be mine. She had agreed! Unfettered. Conjugation would come by Christmas, this I knew. Before the old Yuletide there’d be a million laughs and a million bowls of Alphaghettie, which the young are blessed to find nutritious and palatable. I regress once more. Please hold your horses one bleeding moment, please. I would get proficient, or at least sufficient, on guitar, a few simple chord progressions, enough so we could live like the street-corner saints fetishized in film and television. It was 2002. Some kind of beat generation lifestyle wasn’t entirely implausible, quite yet, even if it quite obviously was. ”

Ten: Allow Brittanica’s handiwork to commence and time its culmination with your story’s beginning:

“Then at her final lesson, and we all knew they were more than lessons by then, Allan Raval threw a big fit, veins no doubt a-thrombous on his shiny bald dome, and his big message was, ‘You’re always running away from things. ’ Six generic words. Anyone could have said them. You didn’t need to be the auteur behind The Hydraulic Engineer Becomes an Open Channel. Marcel_Proust will be speaking wiser words in a month or two. The difference was that Alan Raval believed his own gimmick. And so she believed Alan Raval. She believed she was always running away from things. Or maybe she was just afeared of incestual quandaries. Many are. Many readers of my blog have repeatedly said it’s the one element they cannot abide. And so they eloped. Fuckin’ actually eloped. She signed up for a life of conceptual album midwifery in Sault Sainte Marie, a musical scene that has not, historically, birthed many breakout conceptual albums, or albums period! Rather than sensibly running away from Allan Raval, she ran right into his Lex Luthorian grasp, with his many felt hats, with his 5’7 manlet frame, with his eventual decapitatory desires, with his ‘sonic juxtapositions’ and ‘powerful dramatic structures. ’ A little slower, please. Almost there. Things got progressively sad, rending me the wreck of a man I’ve gone on to become, Britannica. And in her final weeks and months and days I did not speak to her, only sent her the occasional photographic document of my substance-lubricated decline, to engage in Barthes’ “impulse towards askesis. ” To say to her, “Turn back. Look at me. See what you have made of me. ”43 43 (Barthes, 2002)