Today I’m going to go into a little bit of a story that is quite telling about parts of myself.  A little look behind the curtain at what happens in my brain.

In 1997 I was a common breed of video game nerd.  I was 17 years old, and heavily into console gaming after having bought myself a Nintendo 64 and a Playstation the previous year.  I was also building my then burgeoning collection of CD’s (long since dwindled, physical media? pfft).  The first CD’s I had bought were from The Beatles, but I was big into classic rock at the time so I was soon adding things like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Steve Miller Band to my set.  And so a unique situation arises wherein I’m listening to a lot of old music and playing (what were then) top of the line brand new video games.

I was a huge fan of Final Fantasy as a kid (not necessarily so much anymore, but that’s another topic entirely) and was eagerly awaiting number 7.  Eventually it came out and I played it for hundreds of hours, interspersed periodically with bouts of Lynyrd Skynyrd (a greatest hits double CD that was in heavy rotation on my player, don’t judge I was 17).

So now, as a 33 year old (theoretically grown) man I have strange associations in my brain.  Every time that I hear this:

my brain starts thinking of this:

I’ve found no good way of disassociating the two, nor am I sure I even want to, as it brings me a strange sense of bizarre glee that somewhere in the folds of my brain matter two unlikely neurons are inextricably linked.  In my head, southern rock means mako reactors, materia, pointy hair and nigh incomprehensible storytelling and I’m not sure I’d have it any other way.