Mourning my younger brain

So I was booking down Bedford, late for [redacted] when an Architecture in Helsinki song came on my zPod and that hazy half-memory thing happened, where you’re not sure if there is an actual memory hovering just out of reach, or maybe it’s something to do with a dream, or just generalized deja vu. Something about Architecture in Helsinki… I walked on, trying to remember.

Finally it came back to me. Party in the Berkshires. Some dude, talking. We were outside. Thin crust of snow on the ground. He had glasses. He went to a show and he didn’t like it because he doesn’t like the new stuff. “Huh,” I said, because all I know is the new stuff. That was it. Nothing revelatory there.

It happened less than a week ago, but the memory feels so foggy and faint, it might as well have been a past life.

So I’m thinking, God, was I that drunk that I totally forgot that until now?

I used to be the one who remembered everything. It was like a party trick. People were always full of awe and/or embarrassment, because I could recite whole conversations, practically verbatim, from last night, or ten years ago, or whatever. But now I’ve got a brain like a sieve, like the rest of the world.

When I think about it, I was hardly drunk at all at the party. It’s just that that conversation was really unimportant. My brain was doing me a favor. I mean, why remember it? Who cares?

But I feel nostalgic for the sweeter, more innocent brain of my youth, which deemed everything I witnessed to be really important and worth filing away. That old brain was always processing, categorizing and revisiting, endlessly. It was even a little exhausting. The thing had seven stomachs, like a cow! My new brain is so cold and cynical. Most stuff it lets just pass by. Hardly anything is good enough for it.

Sigh.

by Pistol Whip | 1 February 2007 | nostalgia, in earnest | Comments