Notes

From Midnight Radio: A Toarchlight Shining at the Bastards by James Reeves.

Where he writes about this amazing brass pirate lamp his grandfather owned.

For decades, this brass pirate lamp stood on a workbench in my grandfather’s basement that smelled of spider poison and Saginaw Bay.

That, whoever is reading this, is one hell if a sentence! I wish I wrote sentences that good.

Anyway, James talks about how when his grandfather was moved into a retirement home.

To help residents locate their rooms, the nursing staff encouraged each patient to place a memento on a shelf next to each door. Plastic flowers, birthday cards, family snapshots, and woodland figurines lined the halls because it’s easier to remember a picture of your grandchild than room 27B.

That got me thinking about memory, and our relationship to memory. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as of late. Don’t know why.

Many people have been posting about an essay by Terry Godier that articulates something he calls “phantom obligation”. I’ve read it twice and have been thinking about the concept much more than unexpected.

However, the way I’ve been thinking about it has more to do with how I feel a version of phantom obligation in relation to small household tasks, and within significant relationships with other people and institutions.

It’s nice to have phantom obligation as a signifier to think with, to name what I might be feeling after I feel it…

The rendering of the concept into words does not cure my tendency to experience phantom obligation, but it does help me retroactively interpret that experience in a way that has the affect of reducing the pressure of the imagined/assumed/felt sense of obligation.

I think this is a good thing.