If you’ve ever listened to God Shuffled His Feet, by The Crash Test Dummies, then you have an opinion on it.  It is a record that begs to be talked about and garners strong reactions.  I have had many conversations with many people on the achievements and failures of this record.  So much so that when the title track played on my iPod as I was driving to work today, I found my brain flooded with memories of people from many points in my life and our conversations and shared experiences with this music, and I was brought almost to tears.  It was overwhelming; a reunion in my head.  I thought of Meredith, who finds the album to be very frustrating because their harmonies and melodies are quite beautiful, unusual and strange but gorgeous, and that beauty is delineated by asinine lyrics.  I remember Marissa pestering me for over a year for a burned copy of the disc that I’d been promising her.  I remembered listening to the song for the first time back in 1994, a tumultuous and hauntingly beautiful time in my life when everything was changing, everything seemed wrong, and everywhere I turned I saw reasons to fret, to quit, to surrender, but beauty seeped in to the negative spaces and I saw the glory of the world and the allure of survival for perhaps the first time.  Like the stars that we can only see in the darkness, Life called out to me in music, art, smiles, and so much curly hair.  And this song was there, its deceptively beautiful backing vocals soaring the chorus to catch the breath in your throat and whistle it into your heart.

As I was singing along, parking the car, I felt the catch, the lump, in my throat and I stopped myself, and set my brain to investigate.  It was the flood of memories, the superimposing of that song in this moment of my life, and I couldn’t help but recall my own fascinations with time, space, and the sense of self.  I tackle these issues in Moosejaw‘s song “Pieces of Me”.  It’s about being somewhere you’ve been before, and feeling the ghost of your younger self watching you at this time and realizing that though you recognize the Ghost, the Ghost doesn’t recognize you.  It’s about being in Point a at X o’clock, then being in Point b at Y o’clock, and what happened to you between those spaces and times; what you became, and what became of you.  This song, bringing back these memories, to this version of Me, was exactly what I’d been trying to explain, or perhaps understand in my own way.

I drive down streets to locations in San Diego that I first saw 10 years ago with Virgin Eyes and I see them differently.  The sparkle of discovery has faded and they’re old hat.  It’s not all bad, mind you; just different.

“Now I know who I am and I know who I was but I can’t wrap my head around what I’ll become.”