The most surreal experience of my entire life

[aprilstarchild]

--happened just a few months ago.

While talking with Seamus one night about what the cable channel Nickelodeon was like when we were kids, I suddenly realized that the intro to You Can't Do That on Television was an homage to Monty Python. Like, not even a subtle one, either.

I was alarmed at myself for just then figuring that out, and posted

Comments

[clevermanka]

I forgot that I went to Disney World. When I was seventeen. Like, that's when I went to Disney World was when I was seventeen and I forgot about it until I was in my 40s and looking at old photos at my parents house.

[aprilstarchild]

Whoa! That sounds even weirder. At least I was a kid.

[clevermanka]

I have a fantastic memory for facts, but I have a very weird relationship with emotional memories.

[glowing_fish]

I actually don't have surreal experiences like that, because for the most part I have a good memory.

Most of my surreal experiences come from the realization that places I know are places I've been interacting with for 30 years. And that even though the physical memory is the same, I can only catch flashes of the feelings associated with them. A few blocks from where I am now there used to be a restaurant where my mother would take my sister and I for Mexican food that was a dollar a meal. I can remember it perfectly and I can look at it, but the feeling of being there eludes me, except in flashes.

[aprilstarchild]

I have that with music I've listened to a lot, if the music also coincides with an emotionally intense memory.

Like, Radiohead's Kid A. I've listened to it so much that most of the time it's just my pleasant "oh yes this album I love this album" feeling, but if I'm in a certain frame of mind, it also reminds me of when I first listened to it, driving back and forth from a dude's house fifteen years ago.

[glowing_fish]

I sometimes have a related thing when I listen to music that wasn't contemporary for me, like something I only found out about a few years after its release, and I try to think about what I was doing when it was released. Like when Nas' debut album was released, I was still listening to grunge, and I didn't listen to it until a decade later. And I try to think of that zeitgeist of 1994, and how there was this thing that I was vaguely aware of (I did read Rolling Stone!) but that its zeitgeist didn't intersect my own.