Five years since I started this journey.

Entering my fifth year with chemo brain, and there is zilch progress so I’m pretty sure I’ll have it forever…

So I still can’t read books or articles or do stuff that requires that I actually use brain power cos it isn’t there. Gone. Useless.

Same applies for listening to audio books or podcasts or radio cos I tend to zone out completely, too much hard work to listen and pay attention and actually enjoy it.

Not that I don’t try, you never know, today might be the day that brain actually pretends to work for more than a zeptosecond at a time.

I was on a road trip with a friend, and he says “Let’s listen to Thomas Seltzer’s podcast” and I thought OK, I can try that, so we turned on the program about 80s music and woohoo! Started off with New Order’s Blue Monday and it took me all of forever to remember who and what it was (tbf I was kinda sure it was New Order but had to search the lyrics to be sure)…

It was a decent show (unfortunately in Norwegian only) and there was plenty of great music – yes, I quite agree, this is a lovely video!

But then he goes on about Michael McDonald and I was thinking I don’t recognise that name, and he plays this:

Not ten minutes before, we’d been talking about the difference between soundtracks then and now. How in the “old days” music was written specifically for a scene or feeling in a specific movie, and if it’s good, it’s perfect and that music will forever bring you back to that scene and that movie.

I’m pretty certain I haven’t heard Sweet Freedom since the 80s. However, it took me probably ten seconds to think “Shit! Movie!” and then everything stopped, except I kept thinking Gregory Hines for some reason (another person I haven’t thought about since the 80s) and suddenly I was thinking about White Nights (1985) which I loved but it didn’t make sense, so I was kinda stuck there so I had to imdb it – and I was just one year wrong. It was used in Running Scared (1986).

I’m impressed. I can’t remember what day it is nor what I had for lunch half an hour ago, I forget names and faces and just about everything – but that one song sent me straight back into a long lost era. I think maybe The Matrix (1999) was the last film where songs can trigger my neurals into happy memories about films. I miss the time when the film industry was all about quality rather than quantity.

Just for the record, since this post is about movies, music and amazing dancers, I’ll finish with this. One can simply never watch it enough.