I’ve been racking my brain, stretching and pulling at the tendons of memory – snapping ligaments and cracking bones – trying to think of just the right format, just the right angle to use to tell this story. The story of me.

Many ideas have made their way into the running, but only a choice few have come anywhere close to the page. After all of that I’ve realized that this site is just a sounding board, a raw template to work that all out. So I think I will just let fly and sort it out at the end.

I’ve been cataloguing the crushes, romances and great loves of my life, and trying to cross-refrence them with the songs that remind me of those moments. I’m thinking of calling it “Our Song in Retrospect”. The only problem is that some of these people are indelibly linked in my mind – with a song, a record, a sunny afternoon groping to the sounds of traffic from the nearby highway – and some of them are vagaries of time and space.

Some are barely echoes. I can’t remember the name of a girl 12 years ago, the one I met at a party at Danielles. We sat in the driveway, smoked a joint, talked for 3 hours and then made out. We went on two dates afterwards and then just fell away from each other. I can’t, for the life of me, remember her name, or her face. I have the overwhelming feeling that, at the time, I thought she was my perfect woman. I couldn’t tell you why. I remember nothing but that she existed and that I thought she was tremendously cute and that she had short dark hair.

On the other hand, there’s Robin, the first girl I ever kissed, on the first day of Kindergarten, 27 years ago. I can picture her face, her pigtails, her little Laura Engalls flowery dress. I remember that she brought ants-on-a-log for snack time. I knew her for precisely one month – before we moved away and I set to kissing the girls in my new class.

These are the faults of memory that stand in my way. After numerous cranial traumas, years of being kicked and/or boxed in the head, and subsequent bouts of severe drunkeness and moderate drug use, I don’t imagine things will come any clearer. So I will march on, secure in the knowledge that I will probably fabricate half of what I write here.

Be prepared. The record is out of the sleeve. It has been dropped on the platter, spun for posterity. The needle is dropping… now.