I have a great memory. It’s not perfect, but it is well above
average. It has served me very well in
the past, for both important and trivial reasons. It is like any other anomaly a person may
have. Being beautiful, having a great singing voice, having a math brain. I am no exaggerating that for my entire life,
people have been awed by my memory.
Spending some time in college with real smarty-farties and Ivy-league
educated professors showed me that I’m hardly top-tier. But it’s pretty good.
Now, a good memory isn’t the same as being
smart. Smart is a whole different
animal, that I will not dissect here.
Intelligence and memory are not part and parcel an inevitability to all
smart people. However, with memory you can gain the illusion of intelligence,
plus, over the years, you can get a little smarter.
I’m terrible with metaphors but I like to
keep trying. Imagine an ice cream
parlor. A bunch of flavors, cones,
sprinkles…all that shit. All of the details of that scene are pieces of
information. This is information I can
remember easily. I remember just like anyone.
I read it, I repeat it, I hear it.
Day after day. With an elevated
memory, you start to pick up on patterns you didn’t see on day one. Little girls never want to add chocolate as
the first scoop. Anyone over 50 asks for
a waffle cone. The teenagers pay in
cash. Moms with babies like a single
cone in a bowl. No one takes enough napkins. Everyone likes the vanilla better than Cold
Stone, but the Oreo is better at Baskin Robbins. I just remember, and I remembered the last
time so I can remember now. Make any
sense?
I’m in my forties. My memory is starting to
become a pain in the ass in ways I never thought would matter. We live in a culture that has been
constructed by people with average to shitty memories. We just do. Imagine if LeBron James was just a guy who
owned a car dealership in Ohio, and he didn’t have millions at his
disposal. He’s super tall and he lives in
a world made for people about 5’10” and under. A life of slamming his head on
doorframes and squeezing into business class seats on a plane. He has to deal with that shit every day, even
with the money and success!
Our entertainment is where I’m reminded of
this all the time. It finally occurred to me that the reason I’m so painfully
picky about what I find funny is that my memory is still intact. One out of every 40 comedians or so make me
laugh. Why? Because the other 39 are combing through bits
and set-ups and observations I’ve heard thousands of times over. No surprise, no laugh. It has to be something special if a movie
catches me off guard, or a TV show takes me somewhere new. Do you know how often I predict dialogue? That’s not fun!
Social media is chock full of aphorisms I’ve
already heard, photos that have been passed around a dozen times, memes that
are carbon copies of other meaningless shit.
Also, we turn over so quickly in this culture from one snippet to the
next, how am I supposed to take your sincerity about any one topic
seriously? Outrage over kneeling, the
Ice Water Challenge, Snowden, Roy Moore, Koni, the election, Ferguson, the
Oscars, Deflategate… Really? My point is
that if these stories truly mattered to us, we wouldn’t drop them so quickly.
And, if they are dropped so quickly, why would take the next one that comes
along seriously? I remember, so I know
what’s going to happen. I’m forced to ignore your passions and enthusiasm and
that kinda sucks. (Although, a dispassionate once-over of the news is a decent
idea.)
It can be a pain. I know what I know, and I remember a lot
about what you know. It’s true. I
remember a lot of my conversations, and details that should be long washed away
pop right back. I watched The
Simpsons so much that I might not have to re-watch it ever again. I can
just cycle through a thousand jokes in my head and laugh out loud. Which, I do.
I feel sort of normal when I forget shit. All
the short-term memory stuff. It’s not annoying to me. My daughter will get on my case because I
repeated a question from a few days before; usually pertaining to a schedule
thing. She’s annoyed, I feel fine. I make so many stops all over this area for
my job, and I often forget where I parked.
It takes an extra few seconds to find the car, and I’m cool with it. A
forgotten grocery list, a work call I was supposed to make. No problem.
My average is still pretty damn good.
I realize this could all come back to bite me in the ass if my mind
slips when I get old and crotchety. It’s
tough to imagine though. I’m sure I’ll
remember writing all of this down.
