The room

The room is rectangular with fairly high ceiling, from which hangs (and spins) an old ceiling fan. There are no windows, and the sole source of light is a fluorescent lamp placed width-wise on the ceiling. There is one bed in the room with a thin hard mattress.

I found a picture today

I googled the name of a person referred to in "The world is full of arrows", a previous post, and google sent me to a page that had the following picture, and its a pretty great picture I think.

This Italian movie

from the 1970s probably was on channel 47 with no subtitles. I don't know any Italian, but I watched anyway, when not channel surfing. I saw this about 15-years-ago now.

The story seemed to be about a teenage male who was perhaps wanted by the police, maybe for killing someone accidentally, but maybe for something else altogether. His mother, or family, hid him in their apartment by sealing him in this room with very white walls. Alone in this sealed-off hidden room (the police would come but never seem to find the room, despite searching the house) the boy began to paint on the walls, and as the movie progressed the number of paintings increased. And that was what dragged me in, or kept me returning to that channel. These paintings were kind of haunting (or were then) done with lots of primary colors. I guess the movie company had hired a really good artist to draw what a person trapped in a room might draw, trying to recreate his lost outer world on the walls of his room.

Eventually you arrive at

the logic of the string within the string. Hard to express clearly, this idea that the string has a string within it, the second string unseen because of its enclosure. The goal is obvious -- that the second string (the hidden string, the string within) should be revealed or extracated. Somehow this will improve things, or maybe not, but it is necessary.

Sometimes

I don't want the day to be quite as nice as it is.

I've been walking home from work lately. Its not a very nice route I have to take, crossing over semi-highway type roads (non-pedestrian at least) but the sky has been very clear blue, and lots of greenery on the campus. But a desire comes, for less sun, less clear sky, less trees and less green. Bring on the autumn country?!?

The cold storage room

is a room in my mom's house. It is a room in the basement, that you enter through a door tucked in a corner. The room is long and narrow, unfinished concrete blocks, musty smell, damp, and naturally cold -- probably because its not insulated like the rest of the house, and because it has no large windows for sunlight to enter.

But cold storage room seems like a good name for something else, a special memory storage space, not for main memories but those more obsecure. I thought about these old childhood cartoons that have been haunting me, and some of the other memories. I think they are all stored in some old cold storage room, a room for half-memories you almost never use.

Half-memories, because so many of the entries so far don't concern full-formed strong memories (though some do). Many are about things almost forgotten, or perhaps things almost never-known: a play areas I spent just part of one day in, a cartoon I maybe saw one or two episodes of, and so on. Things barely known or barely remembered, and now a desire to know them.

Once there was a snail

that was trying to get out of the garden, because it was very warm there, but the poor snail could only move slowly.

"I'll help you out," cawed a bird from a tree-top, and he swooped down, and swallowed the snail in one gulp!

"It sure is cool in here," said the snail. "Thank you so very much."

Shoomika

looks just like I do, but he doesn't live in my house. He might live on the roof. If I don't eat my food, he gets it, so I better eat the food. While doings so I will be entertained by being told of the adventures of Shoomika.

In a completely different vein, I seem to have nostaligia for the cartoons of my childhood. Not the ones that were overwatched, but the ones I can barely remember. Their was one on TV Ontario all the time, about the little bear named Jeremy. "I'm a bear called Jeremy, won't you come and play with me!"

see:
http://www.geocities.com/topspeed_jmv/jeremy/


Another cartoon, and this one I probably only saw a few times, though I think my brother saw it more often (why do I think this?) was about some mysterious railroad. Was it the hidden railroad, secret railroad? Google provides answers: it was the secret railroad. A quick google search reveals many others looking for this cartoon. For example I quote from:

http://www.snappedshots.com/mt-static/archive/Purple-Panoply.html

"Hhm? Do you remember Secret Railroad? It was a cartoon I used to watch in the late 70s. There was a little girl, Stella, maybe, with hair like Lisa Simpson. And a black cat named Melody. And an old man who took the train called Passenger or Mr. Passenger and of course a little kid, perhaps named Simon. Perhaps it’s just been fermented and distilled in my brain, but, at least now, that cartoon seems very surreal and mysterious. "

I don't remember as much as the author, (I remember a little boy not a little girl) but that last sentence just gets it right, "surreal and mysterious", and thats exactly how so many of these cartoon memories are.

http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/tvo2/secretrailroad.html