Sounds. Smells. Songs.

I don’t know if I’m ever able to shut my brain off. It’s always running. Rolodexing events and feelings and smells and ideas and things I have to do, and I hope they’re filed correctly so when it comes time to do the things, to tell the stories, to remember to pick up the drycleaning, that these post-its in my brain will surface and tell me what to do.

I fall asleep at night thinking about writing, what will I say next, who will listen, will anyone care? Why do I do this? Why can’t I just enjoy the here and now and live in the moment more often and not have a mind that won’t quit.

I went for a morning jalk or wog or jolk, or whatever you want to call a more-walk, half-jog thing to do with your legs. It’s the most beautiful day out. My shoes crunch over the gravel, I smile at a baby bunny, a squirrel, a bird. I sidestep a pile of animal poop with some sort of non-digested berries in it. It’s still too cool for the flies though.

Then I cross over to the place where my mind reels. It’s this one spot where every time I get to it, I stop exhaling and just inhale because the scent is just one that I want to ingest and have forever. It’s maybe baby’s breath, probably not though, mixed with some weeds, there’s nothing there to indicate a floral scent, yet every single time I walk by that spot, it’s there. It’s the kind of smell that if I could, I would grab a Yankee Candle representative and take them there.

“See, right here. Stop. Smell. Keep smelling! Can you make that into a candle?”

That’s what I want. Not cantaloupe or cotton linen or laundry detergent smells, although those are nice. I want that smell that can’t even be described it smells so luscious. It’s the kind of smell where, if I wasn’t afraid of bugs, non-digested animal poop, and itchy-scratchy things on the ground, I might lie down and make a snow angel right there, inhaling, and inhaling, and inhaling.

So, can you see my mind never stops, because this is not actually what my post was going to be. I wanted to write about music and the impact it has on all of us. How it can turn our mood from sad to happy, and from happy to sad. How it can rocketship us into another era, another time zone, just by the beat and the words and the person singing it. Hotwire, R Martini, and Drew at Drew's Muse (okay, not really Drew, but somebody was feeling a little left out!) recently wrote of songs that affected them. I’ve written about how Fleetwood Mac’s Gypsy makes me think of Diva, and how I love the line from Counting Crows about being feathered by the moonlight, walking along the hillside, with the summer ‘neath the sunshine… I’m listening to it right now. It just gets me. I don’t know why. A Murder of One.

Do you remember being in high school, or wherever you were at the time, and hearing Phil Collin’s In the Air Tonight, and pounding on the dashboard along with the drum solo? Do you remember hanging on friends your senior year in high school, buzzed and happy at an impromptu “my-parents-just-went-out-of-town” party, promising never to lose touch, while Stand By Me played loud on the boom box? Or old U2 like War—Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bad, A Sort of Homecoming? Violent Femmes where you’d scream at the top of your lungs, “Why can’t I get, just one more!?” Or kissing your first boyfriend upstairs at a party, in some unknown bedroom, messing up the comforter while Phil Collin’s Take Me Home played from the downstairs, where kids were pretending to be adults, drinking from stolen six-packs or bottles of whatever they could find that didn’t look like parents would miss from the liquor cabinet.

Don’t you wish sometimes you could rewind, go back to that moment, be with those people, feel the music? You can. Just close your eyes and listen to the music. That’s all you have to do, and you’ll be right back there, with those people who meant the most to you at that time, with the memories of what it was like, the fun you had, how a song could just turn your mood into something new?

Yep. Wow. I’m so thankful that I can have these memories, that I can have these smells, that I still have friends I’ve experienced these moments with, that I can call up my highschool friends, my college roommates and say, “Remember when we’d sit in the dorm room and blast The Outfield? Or remember when we were in that stinky basement, standing on top of the crooked coffee table, warm cups of crap keg beer in our hands, spilling on top of others but no one cared, and we’d be singing, Shook Me All Night Long, or 38 Special, Hold on Loosely?” I can call my friend Tamara anytime Groove is in the Heart is on, no matter if I’m at a bar, and it’s 1 a.m. I can just call her, shout into the phone, “Do you hear it!? It’s our song! LISTEN!” And then she’ll listen as I attempt to sing along with DeLite, at a bar, miles and miles away from her, yet she’s right there, listening to me singing it along with the DJ at the bar, and she knows, she knows that that’s something we share.

Or like when I listen to James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful and I think every time I hear the first line, “My life is Brilliant,” I really do think, yes, my life really is brilliant.

And man, isn’t that stuff just so, so cool? Music. Smells. Life.