Little break from the Epic Road Trip of 2021 to talk for a bit about memories.
Maybe not just memories, but also memory.
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| Me trying to find my keys on the daily. |
Memories are images and feelings recollected from your past.
Memory being your ability to store and remember those images and feelings.
(BTW, this is clearly no substitute for Webster's definition of these words, you should probably GTS if you want to know the difference instead of relying on my loose explanation here.)
Anyway, I got to thinking about both this morning at 3:30 AM when I was working on budget revisions and delinquency trackers while listening to Janis Joplin.
Bobby McGee came on, of course, and I started thinking about the 60's and Woodstock and Kent State and the Freedom Riders and Marilyn and burning bras and Nehru jackets and all the fun and fury that the people who lived through those days experienced.
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| I wish... |
I literally started crying.
I have always been obsessed with that era and wished that I had been born sometime between 1945 and 1950 so I could have lived through those days.
Anyway, it got me thinking about memory, memories, nostalgia, regret, and how we store and sort our experiences.
Pretty deep shit for 3:30 AM, but sleep deprivation does weird things to one's brain, no?
I am pretty sure I have spent more nights in hotels this year than I have in all of my previous years combined. Travelling for work is nowhere near as fun or exotic as I imagined when I was a little girl sitting at the top of Charlie, the cedar tree across the street that was my best tree friend, or prancing about in my manzanita fort draped in items purloined from my sister's closet as I pretended I was Alexis Carrington.
I find it kind of weird that, nearly every time I have woken up in a hotel room this year, the first thing that comes into my mind is FG. FG is someone I barely know. I mean, we used to have lots of funny, weird, slightly narky convos. There was a lot of laughing out loud - in person and in text - and a lot of inside jokes, but no real depth of knowledge about each other, and that was entirely intentional on my part.
If FG isn't the first thing that I think of, it's LD. And LD is like part of my own skin, so it makes sense that my thoughts would go to him first. Regardless, whichever one I first think about as I roll over and stretch and smell that clean, sterile hotel-room-sheet smell, the other one pops in rather quickly.
Which is odd because I have dozens of memories of LD, whereas FG is more of a memory than anything else, but I have hung out in a hotel room with FG twice as often as I have with LD. (BTW, for you moralists tsk-tsking at me - that ratio is 2:1, so stuff it.)
(PS - the exception here is when I am on an Epic Road Trip with C and D. THOSE mornings I would wake up, like, how am I even alive? where am I? who am I? why is there an industrial washing machine clanking and crashing behind my left eyeball? why are those bottles empty? am I going to make it home? is that piece of paper on the floor a Dear John letter from my liver, pancreas, or similar?)
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| Seriously, guys?? What. The. Fuck. I'm going to McDonald's |
ANYway, as I was mulling over my capricious memory, I realized that - never once - have I thought about MG when I woke up in a hotel room, even though MG and I used to meet up in hotel rooms on a sporadic basis over a period of years. Even more odd is the fact that I haven't thought about MG in months, even though I considered him one of my best buds for about a decade.
SIDE NOTE: I am sure some of you are calling the IRS and asking them to review my taxes and possibly emailing my relatives to let them know I am most likely a hooker or something, but I can assure you that is not the case. The fact is that, as a single mother who has, er, needs and has no intention of getting involved in a relationship, I won't ever bring a dude I plan on -erm- banging (sorry!!) into my child's space. Her home is just that - her home. It is sacrosanct to me to keep her space hers and to never put her in a position where my...extracurricular...activities cause her any discomfort or embarrassment in her space. So while you may be questioning my morals, or simply cringing, you can't deny that I have a point in this matter.
Okay, now that I got that out of the way, I need to explain that my rambling about hotels and memory in conjunction was because I woke up (alone, pinkie swear!) in a hotel this morning and it set off a spiral of ruminations on what we keep with us as we go through life and how it affects our days, our lives, and the days of our lives (haha, was watching FRIENDS while working at 3:30).
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| Happy Thanksgiving! |
Why do some people or events stick with us for days, weeks, months, years, and even decades and we have to reminded of other people, places and things that used to be so important to us because they fell off the plateau of our existence?
How can you talk to or work with or commute with someone every day for years and then one day realize you can't even remember exactly what they look like or why you found them so necessary?
How can you miss talking to someone you barely knew, but not mind one bit if you never again set eyes on someone you thought was your best friend for years?
Back on the FREINDS tip, I can remember where I was and who I was with the first time I saw any of the shows that roll in in constant rerun. It is a bizarre sensation sometimes, but other times I am grateful for the memories and glad my memory held onto that.
Speaking of memory...sometimes I think I either have early-onset Alzheimer's, or I am just a remarkable revisionist. My memory is like a sieve that has caught some of the most random things, and let other super-important things slip.
And memories... man, those will do you in every time, yeah?
Unless you can't remember them, that is.
I journal a lot (and blog, obvs), but sometimes I am surprised when I go revisit them. Like, THAT happened?? Oh, wait, yeah it totally happened and you stepped on glass on the way home and had to hop half a mile in a flip-flop until it broke and then you just made your BFF give you a piggyback ride home in spite of the fact you outweighed her by 20lbs.
So, like, the only people - besides the Russian bots - that read this thing are my friends - old and new - and random Insta dudes, so I can't imagine how this is going to go down with such a random demographic.
Imma close this out by saying that, if you are one of my friends and you are reading this, thanks for the memories. I am sure we had a lot of fun, and you can bet I cherish all of the fun we had.
If I remember it, that is.
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| Ya'll remember these? I want one and, like, 12 D batteries! |
Also...LD? Jealous. So, so jealous.
