I woke up in the middle of the night with the phrase “my brain is a lasagna” echoing in my head.
Upon some consideration come morning it’s pretty clear what my subconscious meant by this enigmatic phrase. The sedimentary accretions of obsession built up over the past quarter-century of my existence resemble nothing so much as layers of pasta, sauce, meat, and cheese; varying in their taste and quality, but generally repeating themselves in a consistent order as they stack ever-higher.
Most of the time, I generally operate on only the top cheese level of my mental lasagna. But sometimes various external forces will slice in, surface hidden depths of past ricotta, and I’ll be out here thinking about Homestuck like it’s 2012 again.
The orderliness of the lasagna is an important element: as much as I may come off as an eternal dilettante, forever flitting from fixation to fixation without any seeming rhyme or reason, I’m actually generally pretty predictable. My tastes were fixed at a young age, probably around the time I watched Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy for the first time.
In college I got really into music & bands for the first time and thought I had completely Changed As A Person Forever, you know, the way you’re supposed to the second you get to college.
What I failed to account for, of course, was the obvious fact that I grew up around music, with a musician father, neverending music lessons, devotion to my favorite CDs, etc. Plus my obsession with local theatre company Starkid had more than prefigured my ability to get into Real People Doing Things In Real Life in a fannish way. It was really just another level of the same lasagna!
It is important not to neglect the long-buried layers of your brain lasagna. They are the foundations of your taste, the bulwarks of your very being. Just because they have since sunk far below fresher and more recent additions does not mean they are no longer worthy of your love.
Get in with your knife and fork one of these locked-down days and revisit the ground-floor pasta, the under-cheese. Yes, it’s a valuable psychological exercise in understanding yourself and your own past, but also it might be fun. Like, remember Neopets? I sure do. I’m pretty sure they still have those flash games up. I’m gonna go play some Meerca Chase.