I was sitting in my jeep a few days ago looking through my iPod for something that would pick my spirits up for the drive home. Great little invention. Kinda makes that "10 albums on a desert island" thing useless. Just bring your iPod and you can have your entire collection. Anyway, I decided on the Counting Crows as it'd been years since I'd listened to them. Instantly I was transported to...I'll get to that in a minute. It made me think about that whole "smell is the best memory trigger" thing. Now maybe it's just a deficiency in my olfactory system, but smell has never done a thing for my memory. Sure, it's been instrumental in conjuring up old girlfriends and musty schools, but nothing really useful. Music on the other hand can open wormwholes to my past. When I hear the songs from the soundtrack of the movie that is my life I am instantly bombarded with memories. Sights, sounds, smells, the whole package.
-"I Wear My Sunglasses at Night" and it's 1984. I'm at the pool getting a crappy slice of pizza from a lifeguard who looks suspiciously like Johnny from the Karate Kid. Only more tan.
-"Purple Rain" sweeps me off to a middle school gym circa 1986. It's the last dance of the night (why the last song was always Purple Rain I'll never know), the smell of sweaty teens is thick in the air, as is the dissappointment in not having a John Hughes kind of night. Again.
-"It Takes Two" (Rob Base) brings me to another gym and another dance, this time it's 1990. Ah, but now I'm 16, I have a license and it IS turning into a John Hughes kind of night. This could be THE night...until I find out me and my buddy have to head home. The girl I was with literaly breaks her car in a temper tantrum. Never saw her again, go figure. If only I was Long Duk Dong and she were an amazon.
-The Counting Crows will always take me back to the fall of '93. I'm in a beautiful blue Vanagon with 3 people who were, and always will be (even though we've all scattered into the wind), 3 of the most important people in my life. If only we'd all lived in the same crappy apartment building, it would have been Singles. I guess that would have made me Campbell Scott because I definitely wasn't Matt Dillon. On a whim we're roadtripping to the Outer Banks. Who knew there were barely any restaurants still open during the fall, at least not in '93. It's cold, we've been driving all day and my skin is crawling from waaaaaay to much caffeine. Yet I'm happy. The kind of happy that doesn't come around that often. The kind you try to recreate, but can't because that brand of American Graffiti/Dazed and Confused kind of day just happens on it's own.
So there I am in my jeep, driving home after being at work for 27 hours, the Counting Crows are on the stereo and I'm 20 years old again and I'm happy. No smell could ever do that for me. To tell you the truth, a good amount of smells make me ill. Do the smell of mud, alcohol and funk whisk me off to Woodstock '94? No, of course not. But Blind Melon, Green Day and the Rollins Band do it everytime. I'm turning 21 again at the biggest birthday party in the history of parties, drinking beers thrown to me Stone Cold Steve Austin style every time I shout "It's my birthday". And I'm happy.
Just be careful when adding songs to your life's mixtape. With careful planning you too can have an epic moment like being introduced at your wedding reception to the "Throne Room overature" from the end of Star Wars (yeah, we did that ). Sometimes, though, it's taken out of your control and you end up with something like "Wind Beneath My Wings" by Bette Midler for your graduation song. In retrospect, I would have prefered Blink-182's "Dammit" to have been our song, but it had yet to be written. Maybe I'll squeeze that into the mix for my 40th birthday. Now that would be epic.