Let's Try this Again

Life is strange. Sometimes it feels like a day at a water park. The sun is shining and everyone is full of joy as the dewy air around us is crackling with the cheers of children. It's exhilirating. Other times, I can't help but notice the effluent around me, the pollution in the water, and I'm disgusted that everyone else either doesn't notice or is fine and dandy playing in the filthy poo-water. Somewhere along the lines of that second sentence this stopped being a metaphor and became an actual memory of mine, I think.

Isn't it marvelous how the memory works, or doesn't work? I've been thinking about it a lot lately.

Lorin told me a story the other day about how My Neighbor Totoro was based on a violent crime that happened in Japan. It's no secret that Totoro is himself fashioned after a Japanese forest spirit. Thirty years ago, two little girls were apparently kidnapped, abused, and raped before being murdered in a brutal fashion. While this was going on, their minds inhabited this dream world with Totoro. The mind manifested an escape for them. Or maybe Totoro himself actually came to those girls and made them dream of this escape-world?

Anyway, it's all bogus, because My Neighbor Totoro is actually about a play experience that Miyazaki and his brother had when they were kids. Still, I thought about it for a while, and how that sort of plays into my novel. Every writer is in a sense re-telling a certain story of their life with a different ending, I think.

If one person underwent a tragic event, could that person undo his memory and re-write it completely? Or would he just copy over it, like a VHS tape? If that person was the only one who truly knew what happened, and he re-wrote his memory, would his fake memory actually be the "truth"? No, probably not. Don't make fun of me. Someday I'll re-read this blog and laugh.