I almost always sneeze twice. When I was a kid, I remember telling my mom she would always be able to tell if it was me (vs. an evil clone) based on whether or not I sneezed twice. I imagined me standing in front of my parents, clone at my side, both of us trying to convince them that we were the original. And then the clone sneezed, and only sneezed once, and they would go “Ah-ha!” and grab me, and the issue would be decided. After a while I started to realize that a lot of people sneeze twice. Years later I learned that clones are physically identical, so a clone of me would have sneezed twice as well. Then one day I sneezed once, and that was the end of it.
Everything But The Girl – The Heart Remains A Child || 1996/Walking Wounded
It’s not that you actually think you’re 7 years old. You’re not seeing things; you’re not hallucinating that the wall in front of you is the one from your old bedroom. It’s very subtle. I’ll circle around it with a story.
I’ll be sitting outside on a summer day, and for a brief moment, almost too brief to notice, I’ll feel like I was back in Germany, five years old, walking on a sun-baked dirt path with vineyards on either side of me. Maybe it was the color of the sun as it moved out from behind a cloud; maybe it was the warm air against my skin. I’ll never know what it was, but something brought back that memory, and for an instant it was as vivid as though I was there. But just as quickly it’s gone. Trying to get the feeling back is like trying to recapture a dream upon waking.
That memory – that’s what it’s like. It’s nothing you can describe in any concrete terms; it’s a deep feeling that you instantly recognize. You get the feeling that you’re in your grandmother’s house, or your 2nd-grade classroom, or the baseball game with your uncle, and you can’t describe it but it just feels like you’re back there. You feel like you felt when it was happening. It’s a sublimely comfortable and softly euphoric feeling, and if it happened to me every time I smoked, I’d probably smoke a lot more than I do.
Fat Freddy’s Drop – Flashback || 2005/Based on a True Story
The people of the grey lands did not partake in food or drink, nor did they take time to sleep. Instead, they sat in circles and told stories, for that was all they had carried with them. And when the stories were over, they would stand and look to the shores for the new ones, and new stories.
Most often the new ones came in steadily, two by two, in threes and fours, and sometimes alone. Sometimes they would come in earlier than they should have, sometimes later, and once, one one who did not belong had come, and was told stories in his turn before returning. Every hundred or so years a great many would come in at once, and they would assume there’d been a sickness, or a war, as there were many wars.
In the beginning there were not many stories, but what stories they were – great tales of light and word and thunder, breathtaking to behold. As more came to the shores there were more stories, and though with every new arrival the stories seemed to lessen some in grandeur, even until the last days the stories told still moved the old ones, for they were small yet earnest, simple yet true, and they told of things long lost to the grey lands.
Then one day they all came in – every last one of them. Yet this time there were no stories, only silence. And so the people of the grey lands walked to the shores and were swallowed by the waves, and the waves were swallowed by the lands, and the lands were swallowed by the light, and the light was swallowed by the darkness.
And from the darkness, the first story began -
Nigel Kennedy & The Kroke Band – One Voice (with the Kraków Philharmonic) || 2003/East Meets East
In fact, he knew he probably wouldn’t make it through the night.
It wasn’t how he’d wanted to go. He’d imagined lying in his bed at home, propped up on the pillow his wife had stitched him sixteen summers ago, his daughter’s hand in his. He’d pictured himself telling her the stories he’d never told her, the stories about his friends from the war, about his days in the Chicago barbershops. He’d imagined himself telling himself about the day he’d met her mother.
He’d have told her about their first kiss, how he’d envisioned it being like the ones in the films, and how instead they’d brushed noses moving in and she’d laughed, and how it was soft, and wet, and sweet. He’d wanted to tell her what he’d learned in that moment, that life has a manner of not letting itself turn out the way you’d imagined it. He’d wanted to say that was the beauty of it, that the greatest peace in life came from taking things as they came. And having said that, he’d have squeezed her hand tight, and closed his eyes.
But life has a manner of not letting itself turn out like you’d imagined it, and that night he found himself in a hospital bed, and his daughter was there but couldn’t have held his hand for all the equipment around him. And he couldn’t talk with the respirator in his mouth, and even without it he doubted he’d have had the energy for it. He was tired, and sad.
So he looked at her from his bed, and after a moment she turned to look back. She smiled.
He died in his sleep the following night.
Chorus Angelicus – Lord of All Hopefulness (cond. Paul Halley) || 1994/Voices of Light
This isn’t a puzzle
but some things are
I once came upon a puzzle
that fit
no matter where the pieces went
I called it
Life
Jörmungandr
…plans arrived today
in a grey box with Tucson stamps
and when I was done with them
I had built a Time Machine
in
my garage
In my garage, I got into my Time Machine
put on my seatbelt
looked into the rear view mirror
sucked on a cigarette
threw it into
reverse
went back to yesterday
and drove to a coffee house in Tucson, where
I copied down the plans on
how to build a Time Machine
And when I was done
I put them in a grey box
and mailed them to my house in Denver
the…
