Read My Lips - the blog

Post-it Notes® swimming in a sea of molasses

The other day, I was watching that movie, Dreamcatcher. I loved how they kept showing that one character walking around inside his brain, doing this and that, like it was a library. I can easily imagine someone's brain envisioned as such, but not in such a clear-cut form. I can also peer into my brain. On those frequent occasions when I do so, I do not find my visions to be so vivid. My mind, first of all, is not very well organized. Secondly, my navel, which is the best portal I have found into my mental processes, is no longer top-of-the-line. It oft presents a distorted picture of what I am trying to recall.

Unlike the neat boxes full of properly-filed papers inside of Jonesy's head, my own head is filled with assorted scraps of knowledge and bits of memory strewn here and there. My earliest life was recorded in crayon and those memories are long since crumbled to dust.

My public school years are a myriad of faded mimeograph pages and cursive writing on blue-lined two-hole notebook paper. Only faded carbons remain of my undergrad years. The ones that are still comprehensible are of less importance than originally believed. Here and there, I can still spot a pile of cheap tractor-fed computer paper full of characters printed on my 9-pin Okidata dot matrix printer from my law school years. Beyond that point, my life sped up and became entrenched in the information age. Magnetic data formats of every kind full of all sorts of important facts, happy memories, and inane trivia are laid anywhere a flat spot can be found. Only recently have I allowed my brain to enter into the digital age. Now, with recent memories mostly neatly compartmentalized and categorized, I oft easily find exactly what I want to locate without much thought. Of course, like any rule, there are exceptions and errant thinking sometimes causes some little bit to float out and mix into the morass of forgotten memories. When that occurs, it requires a bit of concentrated thinking so as to dredge my recollection in hopes of relocating my lost thought.

Ironically, just such a catastrophe befell me this evening. I was relaxed, lazily gazing at my navel, and swimming through the assorted mass of information stored within my gray matter. I found myself putting a few scattered pieces together and, before I knew it, I was on the verge of discovering the meaning of life. As I was turning the equation over in my mind so as to look at it from another angle, it slipped from my grasp and slid into the darkness.

I discovered a few scattered remnants of my vision between "tripods for ipods" and "topical bottoms," but my earth-shattering epiphany had been shredded. Those parts that were salvaged were of little use. [NOTE TO SELF: buy a mental thumb drive. 2 gigs worth of storage space ought to hold all the really important stuff.]

I didn't need this. I wasn't looking for trouble. I guess I wasn't watching for it either. However, I have recently discovered that trouble is keepin' an eye on me. That's it for this time around, but personally, it doesn't end here. I'll most likely be stoically ensconced in navel contemplation for a few more hours before I learn exactly what any of this means. End of report.

Posted by Tiger at March 10, 2005 12:08 AM