Memory

I'm happy we have each other

I forget who I am. This is a confession. You ever seen Memento? Of course you have, either directly or by osmosis. I think it's happening to everyone, to some degree. Loss of historical roots and all that. The vision of modern man, the revolutionary subject, as a interchangeable number. Rootless consumer. All that.

People are getting dumber, attention spans are getting shorter, and short term memory is not getting biochemically transformed into long term memories. People you knew all your life aren't the same people they were 5, 10 years ago, because they don't remember who they were 5 years ago. They just wake up every morning, look at their situation, and rationalize it. No one can remember who they were before the screens, the computers, not even the Boomers. They don't really remember it. They remember a procedurally generated AI image of it. A picture of the time before computers, mediated by computers. If you can remember, and the memory isn't a picture, but an emotion, a feeling, a smell, then you are part of a rare breed.

I often think me getting brain damage as a child was a case of “collapse now, beat the rush”. Maybe I'm projecting. But even if I'm wrong about phones, we just had the entire world population have brain inflammation. And I think that I can offer some practical advice on dealing with brain damage. In the world of the blind, one eyed man is king. Help people along.

There are two kinds of memories, long term and short term. There is a kind of chemical process in the brain that turns short term into long term. That's what learning is. Integrating new things. You can influence it in a lot of ways, it's an interesting subject. I think the reason solitary confinement is torture, is because it fucks with this process. The lack of stimulation, lack of anything new inputs to turn into long term memory, is a physical problem for the body. Like being constipated. There's a natural process being put in an unnatural environment, which impedes it. Dementia is the total breakdown of this process, where you can no longer create new long term memories. I am pretty sure that will happen to me eventually. But maybe not. Maybe I'm just bitter and hysteric about having lost a chunk in the first place.

What if it’s not ‘stuck culture’. What if it’s a hard biological reality. What if it’s cultural dementia. What if it’s a general decline in brain function across the entire industrialized world. It’s been the ‘current year’ for at least 8 years now, we joke. Maybe that’s not just something that happens on TV, out - there-, in the aether. Maybe that’s a degraded biological function. Maybe if you use an electronic wheelchair to get around, your leg muscles atrophy.

Keeping a diary of some kind is a good exercise. It helps to externalize the process. The damage is done. You need coping mechanisms. Maybe you got lured in by pornography as a child and now you have a permanent mental handicap. Maybe it’s easier for me to entertain this idea because I have nothing to lose, because I already have a mental handicap.

What does being abnormal mean if everyone is? We’re about to find out.

Brain damage, now everyone has brain damage. Sobriety, now the whole world is physically addicted to mobile slot machines harder to quit than heroin. Including me.

There are lots of ways I can be useful. But when I wake up in the morning, and when I get home from work, that's not what I feel like.

I have an incredible track record. I have done amazing things, before and after the Internet. Hundreds of people are grateful for me, thousands appreciate me. And every time I look at Twitter, or substack, I just don't remember what I ever did to justify people paying attention to me. In the moment, I'm at a loss. I have to remind myself, actively. I have to dig for it. It takes a minute. Past 8 years don't exist. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens.

I have to read the tattoo on my hand “you are popular because you are smart and kind and funny and inspiring”. Hm. Okay if you say so.

Regardless, this was supposed to be a confession.

I just wake up every day, look at my surroundings, and rationalize it. I have no friends, I'm estranged from my family, no one cares about me. Then I go to twitter and say, “no one cares about me”, to the thousands of people who care about me.

I'm going to feel better once I drop the quitting nicotine fat, and get some more sunlight. I don’t know, maybe I am more dissociative than the average guy. I think we should hope this is the case.

This all sounds very pessimistic. Put it another way, I’m getting stronger every day.

I have been thinking a lot about a guy on twitter, who, a couple of days ago, responded to me talking about these bouts of strong emotion I feel sometimes, of feeling lost, “sounds like you were abandoned by your parents or in a car accident or something”, and I have no idea whether he was an avid reader of my blog and making an in-joke that shows how well he knows me, or he was just making conversation.

If you can remember before, that's important. That's what we have to create again.