Forget me nots

I’ll be the first to admit: my memory is complete crap. In fact, I’d like to apologize right now to everyone I have ever met or ever will meet because, the next time I see you, I will probably not remember your name. This is not an asshole thing. It’s not because I’m a snob and I don’t care about you or like you. I do. It’s just that I have the worst memory ever. It’s gotten to the point where if someone comes up to say hello, people I’m around have been instructed to immediately introduce themselves and say, “Hi, my name is ____ what’s your name?” before I look like a total jerkface.

I wish I had an excuse for being a total space cadet, like my friend D. who smokes so much weed, he often forgets where he’s going on the metro and ends up at Angrignon scratching his head. Or my friend M. who hasn’t ever been quite the same after falling down the stairs at a bar and landing on his noggin and now, because of the small plate in his head, can’t stand near a microwave or he’ll pee his pants and forget who he is for 20 minutes. Unfortunately, I don’t like being “on weed,” as the kids say, and I have yet to experience a debilitating skull fracture that causes me to walk in circles apologising to furniture, so no, no excuse here—my memory is just shit.

But, as those old adages go, every cloud has a silver lining and every steaming pile of dog poop has some mystery thing inside that some other dog finds totally delicious. Over the years, I’ve learned to turn that frown upside down. Things aren’t so bad. Having a bad memory means every time I ditch an awkward social engagement, it’s dismissed as another classic “Katigbak space out.” (Sorry I missed your wedding, sis!)

Also, as Nietzsche said: The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time. Do you know what that means? I can watch The Crying Game over and over and really get into it because, man, what is with that weird chick anyway?

According to research from Columbia University Medical Center, “people who are able to easily and accurately recall historical dates or long-ago events may have a harder time with word recall or remembering the day’s current events.” In non-brainiac speak, that means too much memory is for losers. It makes it harder to filter out information and increases the time it takes for new short-term memories to be processed and stored. In other words, having no memory rules! Forget living in the past. I’m living in the now, man! It’s so extreme; like a Mountain Dew commercial except instead of jumping out of a helicopter and landing on a wake board, my fridge is full of boxes of tangerines because I’m never sure if I have any left when I’m at the grocery store.

But not living in the past might be the best thing about not having a memory. Without remembering what I was like as a child or adolescent, I can just reinvent myself. In fact, if memory serves me correctly (which it doesn’t), I was reeeeeeally cool in high school. I was very stylish and handsome and confident and people loved me. And when my sister takes out an old shoebox of photos from the ’80s and ’90s showing an extremely awkward geek with long girly hair and horrible oblong glasses too large for his face that, coupled with a near-blind prescription, makes him look like one of those weird semi-translucent fish you see at the bottom of the ocean in Planet Earth, except dressed in a horribly large multi-coloured shirt that looks like a rainbow threw up on him, I can just say, “Hey, who is that guy?” He kiiiiinda looks like me but he’s obviously not… And when old friends reminisce about the time I was so nervous about asking that girl out that I threw up on her shoes, I can say, “Yeah, who was that guy anyway?”

So, fine. Who cares if girls get upset when I mix up our cherished memories with those of ex-girlfriends? Does it really matter who I went on which romantic European getaway with in the end? And so what if I can’t remember expressions properly so that every time I tell a story it’s so stilted it comes tumbling down like a house of paper rectangles? I mean, cut me some slack here. At least I don’t forget what I’m saying and repeat myself all the time. And most of all, at least I don’t forget what I’m saying and repeat myself all the time.

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA