It's not a river

I have three lines of a song from a CD running through my head: three lines of Joan Baez' The Lily of the West, to be precise. Although she swore my life away, deprived me of my rest, still I love my lovely Flora, The Lily of the West. It is driving me nuts that I can't block it or distract myself away from it. This is actually a fairly respectable sonic haunting. At least, I know where it came from. JG was playing Joan Baez on Saturday, for most of the dinner hour and early evening. Yeah, I know that it's Tuesday today. I'm not sure how long it's been ticking away back there. It could go on for days, too.

Listening to something else doesn't always help. Damn it!

I also do back of the mind counting. If I count in my head to keep track of something, especially the 'one thousand and one' cadence, sometimes my mind will keep on going after I consciously stop. Hours later I will find myself *still* counting in the same sequence -- 'three thousand, two hundred and ............' ahk!

Very disconcerting to have your, what, subconscious, doing its own thing.

There's a really fascinating book about how this works for poets called 'The Road to Xanadu' by John Livingston Lowes, I believe. And if you Google the title alone, there's a neat article here about web writing.

One of the things that has reconciled me to growing old is the fact that my associative memory has improved while a lot of the rest was going to hell in a handbasket. I'm pretty darn good at crossword puzzles and I wasn't when I was younger. And my passive vocab. is huge. Now if dear old Joanie would just quit singing inside my ears.