2003-01-09 - 11:12 p.m.

Remembrance of Things Past

Ah, I'm feeling much better, thank you.

Every so often I stumble across something in my house, and I'm immediately transported back into some time in the past. I suppose this is what comes from having a house full of old stuff and having more of your life behind you than in front of you.

In the library/hamster room I have hundreds of books, some of which I've owned for years but never read. I wandered in there today looking for something new to read, and I happened to spy the book The Philosopher's Stone by Colin Wilson. I've had the book for some time, as well as a couple of other novels by Wilson, but I've never taken the time to read them. I primarily picked them up because I was a big fan of Wilson's non-fiction work on the supernatural, specifically his books The Occult, Beyond The Occult and Afterlife. I recommend these books to anyone who wants to read some interesting scientific-sounding explanations for unexplainable phenomena. Wilson's feeling is that there is so much recorded supernatural activity that it must exist on some level, and if so it has some rational explanation that science is either too lazy or too frightened to try to fathom.

Anyway, one of my resolutions has been to weed out the deadwood in my library, so I took the book down off the shelf. My vague memory was that I'd found it in a second-hand book store, but I noticed that there was a bookmark in the book for the "Psychic Eye Book Shops," and the address given was 4810 Spring Mountain Road in Las Vegas, Nevada.

All at once I knew exactly when and where I got the book, and I had a distinct memory of the place, even down to the smell of it. I was in Las Vegas in August of 1990. A glance in the front of the book confirmed the date - it had been published in 1989.

There was a time when being reminded of this would have been a very unpleasant experience. August of 1990 was a bad, bad month for me - in fact, it nearly wound up killing me. I think I've alluded to it here a couple times. With in the space of a few days I lost a woman I'd been pursuing for fifteen years, and got my store burglarized by one of my own employees. It sort of initiated a slide into depression that was only arrested when I was diagnosed with diabetes in 1995 and spent two weeks in the hospital. The story of August 1990, and the events that led up to it is one of the big untold stories of this diary. I'm going to get around to telling it soon, but it's a bit involved to start right now.

However, it is certainly a relief that remembering this stuff no longer hurts. In fact, living here with my dear Lily has rendered much of that sad story irrelevant, and has sort of released me from the need to tell it, at least right away.

Now, I'm going to see if Colin Wilson can actually write fiction.