Mickey's spaceship was always parked up in my head

Nobody can remember everything, and most of the things that go through the slush pile in our heads roll right out again. Ask me what I had for dinner last week, and I might remember some fucking tasty enchiladas that I made one night, but that's about it.

And then there are also parts of the brain that retain stuff for decades and decades, without ever really knowing it, until it's there in your face.

I've had tens of thousands of books and comics and magazines flow through my possession. It's constantly surprising to me how I remember owning, and I can still remember exact panels from comics I haven't read in 20 years, and I'm obviously quite distraught that all this incredible brainpower was put into, I dunno, cancer research or some shit.

And I still remember all the Little Golden Books I had when I was five years old. For such tiny and thin books, they were always hugely popular. I still remembered things like the Sesame Street ones, and have been more than happy to introduce the next generation to the joys of Big Bird's Big Red Book and Grover's eternal quest to avoid the Monster At The End Of This Book. (The four-year-old is also particularly fond of a couple of Star Wars and Star Treks ones I got.)

But I thought I had completely forgotten the one where Mickey Mouse builds a spaceship and soars into the stars, until I saw it on the shelf at Auckland's best second hand bookstore.

And while the details of the book meant nothing to me now, the thickly painted pictures of Mickey and Donald heading into the infinite were deeply familiar.

Somewhere, deep inside my head, there was retained the image of this spaceship being wheeled out of a barn, or the Beagle Boys getting up to mischief in the vacuum of space. It was all so familiar.

Even after all the booze I drank and all the dope I smoked, even after hitting my head repeatedly over the decades. Even after cramming in the details of a million other comic panels, and book illustrations, and all sorts of other nonsense, there was still a part that retained these images, for no good purpose.

Maybe it is just a pile of sludge in our ears, fooling itself into some kind of consciousness, but it is truly remarkable how some things stick, all through the years, without you ever knowing.