Of Mindscapes

As a Taster, sensory feelings are everything for me. Smells and colors and sounds and flavors and textures are part of what my life is, especially because sometimes the combination of them creates a whole meaningful and memorable scenarios, despite of their usual fugacity.

Those are mindscapes, sensory feelings that combined stick to our memories. We all have lots of mindscapes in all our minds, ranging from all kind of experiences. That sunset hour plus her perfume. The foggy night plus a black metal song. That smell of coffee and plants in grandma's house.

I guess mindscapes are part of the whole personal element study. They can add so much to one's perception that I have this life goal that is to taste as many mindscapes as I can, be it through living my life or tasting other life stories (and clearly this has enormous story-telling potential).

It's weird to think there are people who have experienced mindscapes I could never dream of. It's quite interesting to try thinking of them, to broad my horizons. It's also helpful to realize some of my most influential mindscapes can be completely unknown or uninfluential to others.

I like living in this small city surrounded by nature. Mountains and valleys and forests. Now here's a cold and cloudy day. And I've got a hymn for this mindscape. I mean, there's quite a lot of them. There's so many of these heavy atmospheric, melancholic (sometimes with a hint of anguish)-sounding songs that I had to name them, Sunday Gray (i know, these names embarrass me, but a name is a name). So far the list includes: Alice in Chains' Bleed the Freak, Pearl Jam's Black, Acid Bath's Venus Blue, Metallica's My Friend of Misery, and, currently the most meaningful one, Pantera's Floods (especially that sweet outro, but that's quite because of another mindscape).
This whole mindscape actually reminds me of the city I grew in, which sometimes used to feel this beautifully sad and melancholic in days like this. Hey, umm, all these songs were released in 90s, the decade I lived there. Also, my brother did use to listen to a lot of grunge and thrash metal back then. Probably there's a Nirvana song that'll fit in this list (oh, it's quite frustrating to realize it's just a nostalgia-indulced feeling). So this whole Gray mindscape is indeed one of my strongest ones, and it has even influenced my musical taste. Quite deeply, I'd say, for this mindscape could pretty much even be the reason I love so much baritones vocalists and low-sounding instruments like bass and cello.