this is my nose, or the quantum mechanics of farce

let's talk ingredients- secret and otherwise- and the building blocks of my experience:

lisa frank stickers

some sort of berry lipgloss

the plastic heads of cabbage patch kids

a strangely burning plastic sword in my buddy's backyard

my shin guards

mr bulkie's from 1000 yards away

the inside of a sweet pickles bus

the top of my cats head

day-old white castle

mr bulkie's in-store

perfectly over-popped microwave popcorn

the cold logs in the garage, waiting to be burned not for warmth, but for vicarious involvement in the cosby show

innertubes and a melted ice cream sandwich at the pool

my soaked golden retriever

a singed nintendo zapper deftly re-wired to accomodate a wall outlet

those sulfury small discs called "chinese dragons"

boiled asparagus and charred steak

those vinyl mats in gym class

fortune cookies

a christmas scratch-and-sniff book that amazingly still produces the oranges and the gingerbreads

empty pizza boxes and baseball card gum

taken together, these ingredients represent a small cross-section of my nuclear terroir- the memories of senses generally in orbit around my home as a child, a canon of slow-cooking tomato sauces, panoplies of consumerist big bang trajectories, and all the other little fictions.  the home, a mnemonic architecture for the pastiche of senses within, without, and all around.   before i trip the proust fuse completely, who's to say that gooseberry nose isn't actually the aftertaste of vidal sasoon suspended in my mother's dressing quarters?  that that meaty syrah isn't a slice of cold sausage pizza in my lunchbox?  for me, that nuttiness in a pinot is really a dairy queen parfait from the middle of indiana.  that tangerine acidity is actually a brilliantly prepared orange julius.

i'm not going to run from my past anymore like i do from camcorders and minivans, no.  i'm going to reclaim what's mine, comrade and storm my senses like ollie north in hypercolor and erasable ink.