Recently, I was prompted to rummage through the back of a memory drawer by a MetaFilter thread on the circus. In the thread, a poster noted that the classic big-top incarnation of the American circus ended with a terrible and deadly fire in the 1940s.

I found this very puzzling, as I have distinct personal memories of having attended a tented, saw-dusted, circus. Horse acts and elephants parading, Clowns in a car and trapeze artists and tumbling acrobats. A top-hatted master of ceremonies and a uniformed brass band in the bleacher seats.

Interestingly, I also have a memory of attending a public concert given by a uniformed brass band on a gazebo-like bandstand, a memory seemingly ripped from a Ray Bradbury novel. However, my father, an inveterate gadgeteer, actually taped this concert on a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder he had purchased for use as an innovative correspondence mechanism while we spent a year abroad. I have both tape and machine and have listened to the brassy strains of that summer afternoon within the past five years. I began an audio-capture project on this and other tapes about eight years ago, but it was just before hard drive costs went into free-fall and space constraints caused me to abandon it.

Given that one improbable time-traveling memory should prove indisputably real, it stands to reason that another might as well. Yet, the circus impressions I retain are clearly early-childhood memories, so I had assumed that the recollection might have been crossed wires derived from a media-based experience such as a movie.

On today’s drive in to the airport with my parents, I had the early-morning presence of mind to ask them if I had ever attended a tented circus.

To my surprise, they said that I had, during the year we lived in Chile over 1968 to 1969. Dad said the circus set up their tents in a dry riverbed near the town we lived in, Vi&ntlide;a del Mar, which held some futbol pitches. His mention of this conjured up another layer of lost sense-memory – a panoramic hubbub of yellow dust, the bustle of the midway and crew, the tent itself looming up against a midsummer backdrop of browned bluffs above the riverbed.

Mom and Dad did note that they don’t recall the tent as a true three-ring wonder, and I guess that jibes with my recollections as well.

(Posted at the boarding gate from the phone with the intent of adding links later, to Viña del Mar and to the MeFi thread, among others. UPDATE: link’d!)

UPDATE II: Things has an inspired essay on the developent and practice of the English Victorian spectacle, a close cousin to the circus.

Not quite a year ago I stopped using the excellent weblog com position tool ecto and went back to composing entries in the browser. I am not sure why any longer.

This is a test.

A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly – New York Times.

Intolerable. Unsurprising. Unchanged. Specifically American. Why I will never have a child. Why I fucking hate you and your entire family. Why my hatred exceeds that boundary. Fuck you. Fuck you all.

How to set up a square foot garden. It is time. I need to measure a bit.

Or, I could just use the shared internet over bluetooth feature that comes with The Missing Sync.

As I am right now.

Happily for me, I did not come across David Denby’s much-better-worked-out thoughts on No Country For Old Men until I had recorded mine, fragmentary as they are.

Interestingly, he seems to get to roughly the same place as I, wondering at the spectacle of such plainly apparent technical mastery deployed in the service of what he, too, characterizes as nearly nihilism.

I left out Lebowski the other day, primarily because its’ themes are sufficiently distinct from No Country that I didn’t want to drag the Dude into the discussion.

Denby doesn’t leave him out, and rightly so.

(In passing, I find it amusing that parts of Lebowski, like There will Be Blood, were shot at Greystone Mansion.)

In Lebowski, Walter dismisses the comic badmen that have hassled the bowlers, later also describing them as cowards:

“No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

It sure seems unlikely that the Coens intend the ineffectual clutch of Eurotrash as a self-portrait. Yet it certainly does not seem outlandish to assume that they have wondered about their own work’s relation to nihilism, even if one assumes they would, like Walter, dismiss the idea.

Today while out and about we passed a man lying on his belly on the sidewalk in his underwear. He had quite clearly just shit his pants. It was quite cold, and a pair of missionizing, tie-wearing young men were unfortunate enough to be the first people to walk by the man.

Given their current metier, they were compelled to engage the man in conversation, presumably an oveture to an offer of aid or a phone call to the police.

We did not remain in the vicinity long enough to determine which it was to be.

Tonight’s dream spectacular featured me, drunk, unable to put the car out of reverse and consequently executing careering donuts up and down the lawns of an unfamiliar and well-to-do suburban neighborhood. I was of course seized by a mob of wealthy teenagers who beat the holy fuck out of me. It is the beating part of the dream I recall most vividly.

In other dream-related news, I have been awakening once a night from a foreclosure nightmare. How I hate home ownership.

why izzit that my boy kitty Simon smells of maple syrup?

I dreamt that Viv and were traveling through china by train, and on debarkation, became separated. I awakened as, in the dream, I scrolled through my cell phone’s contacts, looking for someone to call or text for help.