I love the theory that ghosts haunt buildings due to strong emotions getting trapped in the walls. If it's true, it implies the walls are listening all the time, like sponges listen to the tide. Our every emotion, every day, getting stuck and echoed in the buildings we grow up and earn our money in. Even if there are no immediate phantoms, there is something comforting in the idea that our existence is being recorded by our environment, even if just minutely.
I think through that as I paint the walls of my son's bedroom with cheap, white paint. I sand the stain blocker put down to cover up blue-tac grease - immediate echoes of the last few years, posters from kids magazines turning into background signals. The sandpaper bites into palimpsests - below the stain block, beneath the grey-lavendar layer that was already here - from under there, a sky blue peeps out.
This house has had three lady owners before us. I know this room was where the last owner's son grew up. He was almost an adult when they moved out. I wonder if the sky blue was his, from when he was my son's age. I wonder what emotions got trapped in the blue, what distant memories I'm about to seal in with a new layer of paint.
Yep, a fresh layer going on. A new canvas for recording new happinesses, sadnesses, boredoms and shrugs.
The moral of the story is: Never, ever buy cheap paint. It kills the ghosts.
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Is Disposable Evidence becoming an actual newsletter? I don't know, I'm writing more into it. Deny categories. Go with it.
I enjoyed mentioning Louise's blog last time, and there's still some amazing stuff I'm reading at the moment. A friend has been entering thoughts into Medium like he's on a mission, but he has a natural knack which has really caught my attention. Like this, from a recent post on smells and childhood and the Amiga 500:
My whole family have changed as people due to time. I must have done too but I just feel like a worn out and run down version of the same four year old that was there on the day of purchasing an Amiga. I often look on eBay looking for the same VCR and television we had in those days. Maybe I’ve never moved on. My bed, though, is not now strewn with bears, although they are still around in my mother’s house.
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