In all our lives, we go through periods of time when things aren't the way we want them to be. Maybe we would change the people, places, or things around us. Maybe we would use the fast forward button on an imaginary remote control to speed up time until the unbearable and annoying have passed. You would fast forward well past that last tear in your ducts that excretes before you can realize there isn't another coming and you might as well stop crying.

Unfortunately the fast forward button doesn't exist.

Because of that, it is sometimes easy to digress to earlier happier times when things were so good that that time period holds up in your mind as the standard for normalcy. It may be above normalcy in actuality but as humans with expectations as they are, most of us toss our standards as high as we can against the wall, like a pickle from a McDonald's cheeseburger. And we watch to see just how far that pickle slips down before it decides that there is equilibrium between the gravity, the stickiness and the comforting friction provided by the wall that causes it to finally stop at a point.

It is with this false sense of normalcy that we cling to things that remind us of those time periods.

One of my relatives has had a fast-forward worthy year or so. She has been stuck in a below standard period. There is nothing anyone can do to change it. It is just one of those unbearable times that everyone has to deal with at some point or another. There is no turning it off. You can work hard to distract yourself at every turn, but at the end of the day, when you fall asleep and when you wake back up again, the reality will slowly sink in and an imaginary - but all too real burn will once again ignite the back of your head.

It is periods like these when we put ourselves in that time machine to find our personal epitome of normal. We hunt out things that will remind us of these times in the hopes that it can work to be the ultimate distraction. Maybe we can recapture feelings and escape a little more into something older, more comfortable and more familiar. I think my downtrodden relative was searching for something just like this when she was looking for an album by a guy named Jimmie Spheeris, which she casually mentioned to me last night at a family gathering.