That Guy From The Thing

The biggest challenge to writing something on this blog every Thursday isn't coming up with something to say anymore. Partially that's because I've been doing this long enough that I know once I start the actual typing, something is going to come out of it, and probably something I'm OK enough with publishing for quasi-public* consumption. It's less a built confidence and more a steady erosion of standards over years. I've acclimated myself to releasing into the wild strings and strings of shoddily constructed first-draft paragraphs hung together on the thinnest, most specious of premises. As the coherence wanes, the self-administered pats on the back become inversely more robust. There's a half joke of an internet saying "god grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man," and sister, let me tell you: it's something!

The other reason I feel the rhythmic sting of the blinking cursor on a blank page less and less as I sit down to do this shit on the weekly is because I'm 48 years old and my memory doesn't work anymore.

Was that fun at first? The first time I tried to think of the names of players on the baseball team I've followed since I was 11 and either drew some blanks or mix-matched first and last names that didn't go together? Ha, funny story, I can tell you: FUCK NO, it was goddamned terrifying. In the same space of time, I lost much of my close-in vision (already after a lifetime of not being able to see shit BEYOND three feet without glasses) and the ability to recall the name of the guy who played Jane on Firefly** all at once. If you're younger than me and haven't hit this stage yet, it feels a little bit like a gravity well has opened up in the middle of your consciousness and everything that makes you a coherent, identifiable, affirmable human personality is on the brink of being drawn in, crushed and extruded into smaller and smaller strands, inevitably into atomic nothing...

You're going to be surprised, but: that's a little dramatic! One of my favorite writers, the prolific wit and satirist Terry Pratchett drifted away from us with an early onset dementia, now Bruce Willis has been rendered socially inert with a type of degenerative aphasia... It turns out, though, I don't have either of those things. I just have regular Dad Brain. Is it curable? It is not. But it's so common, every comedian in the 1980s had a bit about it. So it turns out it's exactly as interesting as airplane food.

The value of complaining about it, as a result, approaches nil. This of course is unlike the manifold other things about which complaining can have an immediate salubrious or at least mediating effect, like all the things that are wrong with or annoying about your significant other. All you need is persistence and volume and that's a problem that will solve itself for you eventually, though sometimes it does also eventually require the retention of legal counsel to ultimately resolve.

I'm choosing, then, to focus on the positive. Why doesn't it feel like it's quite so difficult to think of something to write about every Thursday? Because I'm unburdened by a reliable catalogue of the topics about which I've recently written. I swear to god as I started this I ran more than one search on the archive of this blog to make sure I hadn't recently written about my dumb, busted memory. I'm still not 100%, but look, you can just count this as part of an in-depth series on the topic if the Blogger search function has let us both down here.

Even if I do find a conflict with something I recently covered, the lead-in anxiety has dissipated. It's not the the ideas are new, it's that they feel new, even if they are ruled out by the most cursory investigation of output I produced as distantly as 14 days ago. I'm pretty good at recalling what I wrote last week, but before that, it's me an the bliss of ignorance, new best friends.

For now I'm learning to offload the memory function to google, imdb and the Notes app on my iPhone. Between those three things I can have at hand all the human knowledge fit for retention, like I did in my 20s, but allowing for a slightly longer recollection speed to account for the typing.

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*I think you need at least double digit readership to constitute a quorum to make a thing "public," a threshold we at the blog slightly struggle with week to week.

**I know it's Adam Baldwin, but only because I looked it up just now. That's not a great example because there are so many acting Baldwins, none of whom he is related to, but one might be forgiven for being confused, even with a younger man's brain. Also apparently he's a right-wing chud, which isn't that significant an identifier as that could just as easily be Stephen Baldwin.