Run Every Red Light on Memory Lane.

The past keeps knock knock knocking on my door...
And I don't want to hear it anymore.

Or so says Lou Reed.

But rare is the person who can sever so completely all ties to his or her past as to not be haunted at one moment or another by memory's return. Geography, friends, family, keepsakes fluster our attempts to re-create from whole cloth our lives. So we patch together our bits and scraps and do as best we can, which quite often is pretty damn well.

Getting older brings a melancholy, because I can remember when my feet didn't hurt after playing basketball for two hours. I can remember when I could stay up until two a.m. and get up around six a.m. and feel none the worse.

We would all love to correct our mistakes. For me there's a moment in eighth grade that stands out because I didn't act as I should have. Sometimes they're the white hot moments of decision: to fight or flee, to knock over the liquor store or not. Sometimes they're the long slow turns of screws: the bad relationship, bad job, or ill-advised college major selection. The best we can hope to get out of these mistakes is to learn from them and not commit them again. As the right honorable Beastie Boys opine, "As long as I learn I will make mistakes."

Dreams return things to us unasked. Dreams are interesting: they are utterly internal to us and of our own making, yet they are uncontrollable. Freud's return of the repressed. "If my thought dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine," sang Bob Dylan. What do you do when the decades keep coming back at you?

I feel much of this mood has to do with my standing on the cusp of another transition, as my defense date approaches. My mind's done thinking about the mountain of the task and is now occupying itself elsewhere.