The memory machine

Posted on April 11, 2009 in Memory Writing Exercises

“The drugs have done a number on my brain.” That phrase would perplex my students. “What does it mean?” they’d ask me. The best I can do is summon up the image of a vast machine programmed to do certain routines. One causes you to remember a time when you father slapped you around until your head rang out in anger, humiliation, and heat. Two makes you laugh at the time you dumped a trashcan full of water on one of your pals. Three shouts at you for being so stupid about letting that bastard pick an argument with you over your major. And now you’re at Four, but Four is blank. Sweet-mystery-of-Four except it’s not so sweet, because Four isn’t answering your repeated calls for a response and, what’s worse, it refuses to tell you the way to Five where there might be an answer to the question.

I have found the workings of my brain to be most troublesome and mysterious. Why do I turn eights into threes and vice versa? Why I can’t find my glasses even though they rest on the bridge of my nose? To prepare myself for the anxiety, I panic: I beat myself about the [[medulla oblongata]], throw furniture in the crevices, and bang my [[cerebellum]] against the insides of my skull.

I read recently that when the brain can’t make cholesterol you can’t store and recall details. And one day last week I discovered that not only had I been misspelling that word, but also another which I now cannot recall. How long had this been going on? Did people notice and mark me an ignoramus? Was this a lifetime habit or had I started it only recently? Please, I beg Fate, please don’t make this a general thing. I couldn’t handle finding out that for the whole of my life when I thought I had been saying one thing I’d been saying another or worse gibberish. People could have been picking up their cell phones and just walking away as if I were a silence for ever so long.

This was written as an exercise in a writing support group.