Sunday, May 04, 2003 8:27:08 AM Joe Coluccio
I saw what you did, I know who you are

After about four years of journaling in the morning, I see a lot of what I did.

I made a deal in a dream, very shortly after I began my personal scratching, with my inner censor in which I was granted the kind of unlimited access that memory can allow to the very personal past. As I began to write, events began to come into close focus, memory tickled memory triggered event. Often along with those images, sometimes smells, sometimes sounds, at other times with a kind of synesthesia came a rush of emotion. I found myself blushing in embarrassment at gaffs that should by now have become less sharply pointed. I found myself laughing at some truly funny moments. I have relived days with folks that have passed on (even among the living), so delicate and so precise that it at times has taken my breath away.

It is the source, the wellspring from which my life and my writing derive and I was glad to find that the water there wasn't stagnant but fresh and strong and bubbling. As I journal it is possible to set a tributary of those ghostly waters flowing more closely to the surface. I am not always pleased with the result.

Stringing along with that memory comes a little self knowledge. Enough to keep me up at nights counting the mistakes I made along the way, which seem more numerous than the grains of sand flung into the night sky to form the milky way. Finally I realized that those mistakes were in reality no more than lighted blips along the way. Little reflector signs that I had been turning into large neon blinking display arrows pointing to gouts of landscape that I had been chewing up and never really spitting out. It came to me as I dismantled one relatively Las Vegas large blazing sign and filled over the hole making it resemble a fresh grave that these markers had one virtue over the others (the ones where I was one smart SOB and did everything right and caused joy in Mudville). They are there for me to remember. They make up the road map of a large portion of my memory. We remember the place where the bee stung us not the place where a pleasant picnic with crustless sandwiches and potato salad took place. And so we learn.

I wish that I could say that I no longer cringe when I see Joe take part in such asinine drama, like when he kicked his kindergarten teacher and got expelled from school before it really even started. Like when he lied and told Madame Rose that he could speak and read Italian. Didn’t think I was gonna tell you the real country blues, did you? The day I lost my life? The day I gained it back? That remains in the dark recesses of my daily journal and my mind.

Every so often I get a glimpse a small taste of the universal. It’s enough to make me believe in Jung and his archetypes. It comes as an extremely personal vision which then transcends and integrates. It comes in dreams. It comes when I am driving in the car. It comes when I write. For those few seconds I know without any doubt that I am connected every point of my being with every point of all other being, with the universe at small and at large. I get mystical just holding your hand.

What do you remember? Give old Mnemosyne a kick in the pants for me. Don’t worry we already know that you peed your pants in the third grade when someone slipped a frog under your belt. You’ve only got your life to win.