Of fenceposts and crumb trails

Is there a word for the great feeling you get for a few seconds when you get that feeling that you're on the right track? I'm sure there is a word for it in German, since they seem to be the best at combining disparate words into high-falutin concepts. Something like "feelings-consorting-thoughts" or "connected-object-mindfulnes" maybe.

This can happen when you get a strong feeling of deja vu. I have always assumed that the most logical explanation for deja vu is that you've dreamt about something before it happens. This is not mystical - it's rather the result of the fact that the brain is a powerful computer, repeatedly analyzing myriad scenarios, and occasionally it hits on exactly what might happen a few weeks or months later. I recently had a little bit of this feeling, sitting in my office, talking to a co-worker about a silly work drama.

The other time I get this sort of feeling is when I get the feeling I'm the only person who knows a song that a performer is covering. I don't know why, but I was just so proud of myself for recognizing Nick Lowe's "cruel to be Kind" at a relatively lame corporate function in San Diego. (Well, the people were lame - the open bar and fist-sized truffles being shaved onto the scallops on my plate were awesome.) The guy playing it on a casio-type set up with a microphone looked as generic as could be expected, but I just had this feeling about the fact that I had been recently introduced to the song by a friend for the sole purpose of enjoying that moment more than anyone else at the party. (The great sidenote is that I mentioned this to someone at the table with me, and she nodded, telling me that the first concert she ever attended was Nick Lowe opening for The Cars. So maybe I wasn't so special, but for a few seconds, I was.)



I also recently listened to Mike Gordon's new band for the first time - great, upbeat, quirky pop. On the particular show I found, he does a cover of a Kasey Chambers that I am sure no one in the audience would have known, and I got this feeling that my brief interest in Kasey Chambers - even seeing her on her first US tour, when she was pregnant - was somehow retroactively legitimized by Mike Gordon, several years later.



And finally, Okkervil River covering John Phillips' April Anne has to take the cake. I had just come acros the John Phillips reissue no more than a month or so before I started taking Okkervil River. I loved the L.A. conjured in John Phillips' album - somewhere between Gram Parsons and Joan Didion. Okkervil River's version, on their covers mixtape, is just as sad as you would expect, but I think the song sounds best with John Phillips' crystal-eyed vocals about his ex-wife shacking up with Dennis Hopper. When I saw that Okkervil River had released a covers album, I wanted to skim the tracklist. Seeing that song listed as the opening track was all the convincing I needed that I was, as I suspected, on the right track.