I came across some old—some more than half a century old, in fact—journals that I’d kept, off and on, since back in college days. Also some prose and “poems” from HS days, starting back in 10th grade, but those are far too embarrassing even to read.
Anyway, the journals are proof positive that memory isn’t a reliable adjunct of being human.
I mean, the general picture that I have in memory, mostly that I was* at best a callow youth and at worst a self-absorbed asshole, is pretty accurate. It’s the details that on the one hand flesh out that sense of self and on the other hand illustrate that what I thought, memorially speaking, to have been the case was not the case at all. F’rinstace, important friendships that I thought had disappeared by sophomore year had indeed diminished but had not disappeared as I remember them to have done. Nonetheless there are a lot of friendships lost and never found again—although I have to say that FB has helped me to reconnect with people who otherwise would have been lost to time.
Some things I just do not remember at all at all. At some point in the spring of 1973 I went to Philly to see the Grateful Dead in concert. What I say about that experience is neat—the best concert ever and so on. But I have not a single memory trace of the event, nor of the trip to Philly nor of what I did besides go see the Dead. Similarly I write of getting drunk, or near drunk, several times, but my recollection is that I really did not drink a great deal. My preference by far was for vaporous sorts of mood-altering substances. That is borne out in the journals for sure, but I guess alcohol played some role as well.
And to top it all off, as I sometimes do for gits and shiggles, I asked Word’s copilot AI to structure and refine this, and the damned app tells me that “Copilot can’t generate high-quality content here.”
I choose to take that as a compliment to my scintillating prose.
*Here's hoping the tense is correct.
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