'Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time'

By Rob Sheffield, contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. It was a great book - when he was young, he married a girl he met at graduate school in the late '80s - "a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl" - nothing like himself, except in that they both loved music. He used the mix tapes he made as a boy and during his relationship with her to chronicle his life, his love for her, and what he went through when she suddenly passed away in the late '90s.

I loved it because it toyed with the idea of how our subconscious connects different things in our lives - like songs - to feelings or emotions we experience when we are involved with them. An object or a song or a movie or a book - none of these are merely things. They are all alive with the feelings or thoughts that we associate them with. Newsweek's movie reviewer David Ansen did something similar recently - he's been keeping a list of every movie he's ever seen since he was twelve, back in 1958 or so. He wrote an article that appeared in the magazine recently about how what he was watching at the time brings back memories for him of what he was thinking, how he was feeling at the time.

I thought a while ago about doing something similar myself - recording different associations like that. It's not just music - it's clothes, writing, smells, and so much more, too. It's both good and bad - it's comforting to have memories, but disconcerting in that it makes letting certain things go, incredibly difficult - to make myself break these associations. So many things have a history for me, and my past is never really gone - it's still with me in the little things I see and hear every day.


"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
- Maya Angelou


On some days, it feels like it'd be nice if the crazy machine in Eternal Sunshine was real, and certain memories and connections could be erased from our beings. Or, at least, if we could have the option of locking them up and forgetting about them temporarily. Not forever or even for a long time. To be liberated from them without having to work at it, just for a day. That'd be lovely...


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Listening to: Fall Out Boy - Hum Hallelujah