Ain't so funny when you can't remember what you forgot (..and can only remember what you wish you'd forget?)

 (Click on the pictures to make them bigger)

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"There are lots of things in this life that are difficult to understand, and even greater is the challenge of putting them into words. Friendship is certainly one of them." 

-- Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, Daytripper

I read Daytrippper in the morning today before work. For the sake of perspective, and lest you be wrongly impressed, I'm not some exceptional early-bird reader - my work only begins at noon.

Plan was to save the book/ comic/graphic novel for a trip coming up. But that got canned. And this - whatever 'this' was -- turned into case in point #207 of "just..one of those days". I ended up savouring the book/comic/graphic novel at just the right pace. One sitting was needed. Just past the foreword, I knew I wasn't going to work till I finished it. Lucky for me, my boss was away, four hours behind and staring at the Mediterranean. So I wasn't concerned about receiving texts asking always the same thing: are you coming in today?

There were other things I liked about the 'book' -- other panels, other characters, other -- oh, I don't know - melancholy bits? Other lines too. But the litmus test is always: do I want to get up, find a pen and write this down? This one sailed the litmus. So I made it stay in my diary. I got up, I found pen, I wrote it down. And I forgot about it - till I got to work, that is. Because then, my palms started to itch. I wanted to read again/ remember those two lines and see the letters in my head form those two lines. But it was hopeless! I couldn't remember the line I had noted, the line about, get this: the challenge of putting to words. How bizarre is that! I was a case of desperate Alzheimers! I didn't know how much of what I couldn't remember had to do with the nature of the line I so badly wanted to get! You know? I didn't understand. I suspect there is here, still a sweet lingering irony -- is that the word? - I don't think it is, but... and maybe I'm just happy to over-think, but I went mad in office searching online for that one quote, for those two lines, trying defunct combinations I thought might get me there: "gabriel ba+ writing + friendship"/ "gabriel ba + words + quote"...

I guess people thought the line, this one, the one I wanted to leap at, was too ordinary to rave about on sundry fan sites of the Brazilian twins cum genius graphic novelists. So it wasn't there. Other lines were, but what would I do with others lines when I couldn't find the one quote that spoke to me straight? Once I got home and flipped to the page where this morning I had written it down, I felt massive relief. Like the crack addict I saw two nights ago with his nose lowered to a smoky corner of the pavement, his beggarly butt in the air, nothing comic about it. He too must have though gotten a deep satisfaction from that first, yet familiar hit.