Some people have remarkable perceptual memories, for example; they seem to take in automatically and to recollect without the least difficulty all the rich details of a summer holiday, the scores of people met, the way they dressed, their talk—the thousand incidents that make up a day on the beach. Others retain no memories (and perhaps lay down no memories) of such matters, but have huge conceptual memories, in which vast amounts of thought and information are retained, in highly abstract, logically ordered form. The mind of the novelist, the representational painter, perhaps tends to the former; the mind of the scientist, the scholar, perhaps to the latter (and, of course, one may have both sorts of memory, or varying combinations). Pure perceptual memory, with little or no conceptual disposition or capacity, may be characteristic of some autistic savants.
—Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars
I was struck by this a few days ago while reading this fantastic book. For a long time I’ve been apologizing to friends about “having a bad memory.” I mix up chronology, forget details, and smear entire months into a sort of impressionistic haze. I read novels and remember loving them, but I’m awful at talking about them afterwards, since I forget so much of the plot, and even names of major characters (especially in first-person perspective books). I’ve been working hard to improve that—repeating important things to myself, writing a lot of notes—but much still escapes me.
On the other hand, I have a very good memory for cooking techniques, programming languages, music theory, and other systematic knowledge. I worry that because I remember these well, and interpersonal things poorly, that I often seem to not care about my friends, or people I meet, when I care intensely.
This bad memory also extends to writing - I would have a hard time writing descriptive stories about what I did yesterday or even the day before, so every detail is a fabrication, even if the theme of whatever I’m writing is coming from my own life. It’s exhausting, because to get to those details I have to construct an awful lot of mental scaffolding that never shows up in the piece. I’d say each of the first two short stories here (for a first draft) took almost eight hours of effort. That’s about a word a minute.
I’m happy with the way the two “real” stories I wrote here came out, but I’m finding that to write well requires so much of my time and effort that I’m not able to work, write, and have the life I want to. I’d have to stop talking to people, going to places, and doing other things in order to produce writing I’m happy with. And then, what would there be to write about?
I’ll continue to post here from time to time (let’s say monthly), when I have something I’d like to share. Stick around.
but I made a commitment, so here’s the only thing I really got. I think next week will be better. (Note to self: Learn how to write in something other than first person)
—
“All the glasses are dirty - we’re drinking from the kids’ cups.”
She handed me a drink the color of bubblegum, swirling stickily in the bottom of a green plastic cup. Kid cups are one of the many indignities that come with dating when I should be shopping for convertibles. Still, it was nice to be talking to a woman who was at least thinking about having sex with me. Amy was warm and kind and had a middle-aged softness that suited her. She seemed as if she was born to be this age.
We don’t have that in common. If there’s an age I was born to be, I haven’t yet reached it. My ex-wife Irene used to tease me, calling me an old man because I go to bed early, but I don’t think I’m suddenly going to come into my element at sixty. I’m out of place in many ways. Amy and I didn’t have much in common really, except that we were lonely.
So here I was, holding a plastic cup of watermelon vodka in someone else’s kitchen like a college student. It was nice to feel young somehow. The vodka loosened our tongues, making our speech less distinct but somehow more intimate. It felt natural when I stepped a little closer, though I tightened when I felt her fingers graze the small of my back. It had been a long time since I had practiced this particular dance - I was embarrassed by how clumsy I felt.
He laughed about once a minute, whether I said anything amusing or not. I remembered something about laughter being a social glue - a way of telling each other that everything is going fine - that people laugh all the time when nothing funny or even fun is going on. For some reason that didn’t make his seem any less forced. I felt him pushing his jocularity on me, making me feel like the unpleasant one for not chuckling along. But he was talking about Palestinians, and he was anything but pleasant. I felt that by laughing, I was agreeing. I didn’t agree with him at all.
That was happening a lot on this trip. This man was just a stranger I’d been unlucky enough to sit next to on a plane, but it made me think of the people I had thought I knew well. John had gotten himself tangled up with a sort of quasi-lover. She wouldn’t commit more than any one night to him, and he wouldn’t admit that there were better and more interesting people he could be spending his dwindling youth on. He was already balding, for God’s sake. To be honest, though, I was more upset at her for spoiling my fun with him this week than for spoiling these months and months for him. Of everyone back home, Sam was the most stable, the most like he had been. Did he just know himself well from an early age? Was he boring? Unadventurous? He seemed the happiest.
“So once we let them elect Hamas to the government, everything went straight to hell.”
Jesus Christ. “What is it that you do, again?” I wanted to make sure Chip McRanger here wasn’t someone important before I unloaded on him. Or that he wasn’t some kind of expert on the Middle East. How many experts on the Middle East could you really be expected to run into, though? If this guy ended up being some kind of conservative blogger, he’d send his comment-section orcs to harass me for weeks after I was done telling him to shut up. That would have been the worst thing he could say.
“I have a web site.”
Checking out.
—
When I’d walked out of the airport a week earlier, Christine had been there with a sad little Dodge sedan and a big hug.
“Nice car.”
“Shut up. It’s Mom’s.”
“And how much did they pay her to take it away?”
“I missed you too.”
Five miles later, when we got a flat tire, I didn’t say a word. Chris pulled over and reached for her phone. I went back to the trunk and looked around for the jack and the spare. The spare was there, but it was flat too. It didn’t matter though - there wasn’t a jack anywhere back there. Nothing to do but wait for the AAA tow truck.
“Guess we’re missing dinner. I’ll call John and let him know.” She fiddled with the phone a while longer. I lit a cigarette. You could still smoke outside in this state, from what I could remember. Chris asked for one too. Though we were both ex-smokers, we were the kind who keep a pack of disgusting stale Pall Malls in the glove compartment in case of break ups or flat tires. As we sat there halfheartedly puffing, we talked about our parents, the gossip they couldn’t help but tell us, and the bad dates we’d been on recently. Chris was a master of bad dates.
“And then he told me that he wanted to run for Governor of West Virginia. You can imagine how thrilled I was at his ambition.”
“Sounds like a keeper. I hope you went home with him - you’ve got to lock that down.”
“Well, he kind of smelled bad too.”
She passed me a flask. “We’ll be here a while, and I won’t be driving for even longer.”
“When should I come down and see you next? It’s been almost six months! Let’s not let it go on that long again.”
“Well, I’m going to basic for the Navy next month.”
What?
—
Chris didn’t drive me back to the airport like we’d talked about. After what I said, I’m surprised that was as bad as it got. At the time I didn’t know that I’d call her and apologize in a few days, though. At the time I was pretty sure I’d lost my very best friend. After accusing her of pimping herself out for a dying empire, I’d gone even farther and said that this was just another way for her to prove she was tough to a world that didn’t actually care either way. The world just wants you to keep buying things. When I’m drunk and upset, my socialist cynic self gets the upper hand.
I still don’t understand it, though. We talk, and we see each other, but there are forces moving in our lives that no one sees. For me, there’s nothing that makes sense of Chris crewing aboard a Destroyer, operating heavy guns. Only the small accumulation of decisions and attitudes, the changes invisible and insignificant to our selves, could create this new person. There wasn’t any story I could tell myself to explain it.
We met at a coffee shop. Thank God he suggested coffee. I hate meeting at a bar when you’re just getting to know someone. Can you think of a worse place to have a conversation? Maybe a stock car track.
But coffee. Coffee only has to last about twenty minutes. By then you can decide whether you’re going to stay for another twenty minutes or whether you’re supposed to visit a friend this afternoon. He was sitting at a table when I arrived but didn’t have a drink yet. Was he feeling as unsure as I was? It didn’t seem so. He was confident, completely at ease. A little older than his pictures, but you’re always at least a second older than a photograph. He was at least the same man as in the photos, unlike Jean, who had sent me a picture of her sister and hoped I wouldn’t realize.
I decided very soon that there was no friend who needed visiting today. Tim was warm and the skin beneath his eyes crinkled when he smiled. He worked at the de Young, studying Regency and Victorian art. He told me about the beginnings of photography, the way the camera had changed painting by taking its place as visual chronicle. He said that Simeon Solomon had fallen in love with many of his models from the very first moment he saw them. We talked about a lot of things I can’t remember anymore. Once he reached out and held my hand, I started to lose track of what he said, and if I responded I can’t see how. When we went to his apartment there was very little talking. I flattered myself that I muted him with desire.
The next day Tim sent cut flowers to my office: violet and yellow carnations. It would be some time before I learned about the language of flowers, so I placed them at home on the hall table next to the phone that never rang.
Hello and welcome to Pencil Holder! As part of the One A Day Project - a group of people helping each other stay creative and raising money for charity - I’ll be writing short fiction throughout 2011. I’ll post one piece a week here. At this point, nothing’s been planned out or written down, save some very brief sketches and passages for the first piece. I’m not sure that’s the best way to get started, but one step at a time. Expect the work here to be fairly rough in a first or second draft way, at least until I find out how I write best and learn what’s good and what’s bad.
I write software for a living and have a blog here. I’m also on Twitter: @joeblubaugh.
