Train of Thought

I was choosing a t-shirt to wear.  A yellow one was on the top but I decided I didn't want to wear yellow.  I told myself that it was to have a yellow shirt to ride my bike to the bar this evening, but I really knew that it was because I didn't want to wear something that bright.  I knew this was odd because I don't expect to see anybody for about nine hours, but there it was, no yellow.

I looked through the pile of t-shirts (folded, I now fold t-shirts) and chose a grey shirt.  I realized that I like grey.  I thought back and realized that when I was a teenager my favourite colour was grey and that I still feel a comfort with it.  I wondered if this was just a natural preference or something influenced me.  I thought of the books "The Chronicles of Amber" in which there are nobles each with their different colours.  The hero is Corwin, whose colours are black and silver.

I then remembered a video by The Cure that I had last seen probably 25 years ago.  Long enough ago that I couldn't quite remember the name of the song.  The miracles of Google produced a video for A Night Like This.

As you can see, the singer, Robert Smith, is wearing oversized grey clothes.  I seem to prefer oversized clothes.  My favourite sweater is oversized, as is my leather jacket.  I deliberately buy trousers that are 4-6 inches too long and made of thick cotton so that I can roll them up and feel both unbound by the cloth and still anchored by the weight around my ankles.  I wondered did I take these preferences from Robert Smith?  Does teenage fashion still roll around in my head?  Or, is it that my mind is similar enough to Robert Smith's that we share an aesthetic sense from music to clothing.  Are music and clothing connected in an aesthetic or are our aural and somatic sensibilities unconnected?

I watched the video and realized that I knew the tune intimately and most of the words.  I don't own the song and cannot remember when I last heard it.  It may well be decades.  Why do I remember this?  How did such precise information remain in my memory, unused, unnoticed?  At one point in my life that song was probably the most important emotional anchor that I had.  It expressed who I was as well as anything. 

Then I thought that I wanted some coffee.  Hmm, and probably granola and fruit in the back garden.  It feels like a tropical morning here.  I'm having one of those moments where I feel so far away from where I came.  Not in a bad way, I'm just mystified by how I got from there to here.