After my marathon TV session yesterday, I was in a funny mood. I watched like 5 movies and several shows, mostly about cars. I started out the movie marathon with a western, and then moved on to a pirate movie, and then on to Christmas on Mars (which no one else was interested in watching with me) and then an old Kevin Costner movie called The War came on at like midnight, and I decided I might as well stay up for that.

I remember seeing this movie a long time ago, and that it was pretty heavy and that the dad died in the end, but it didn't play out the way I remembered it. I found myself really hating those little redneck kids and wishing terrible things upon them. I suppose that since I am older now I was able to understand the parallels between the war the kids have over the tree house and the dad's struggle with ptsd. It ended up being a fairly powerful anti-war, pro-love, kid movie. I can't think of another movie anywhere that fits that description. Put it on your Netflix que next to Idiocracy.

After the last movie it was almost 4 in the morning and I was feeling all off kilter due to lack of sleep and the strange mix of emotions I had been feeling all day from having a marathon of such different films. I went to the bed and laid down to sleep, but my mind wasn't ready to shut off yet. I kept thinking about different memories and questioning how reliable they are.

There are statistics somewhere on how unreliable the human memory is on the witness stand. With subtle persuasion, witnesses can be unknowingly coerced into picking an innocent subject in a lineup. Their memories can be swayed by other jurors who see the events differently than they do. What an absurd system this is! The memory is not to be trusted.

When I wrote and posted Shaw 305 on my other blog (You'll have to dig for it. It's been several years.) I got some complaints from people that I hadn't gotten the details right. Some people pointed out that certain events actually took place in another room, or that I was thinking about the wrong night completely when I was stringing some events together. Granted, this was a work of nonfiction written in a prose style, and some embellishing is necessary to keep a reader reading; but I am talking about little details that I would have gotten correct had I remembered them accurately. I was writing that piece some five years after the actual events and it makes me wonder what else I got wrong that I thought I could have chiseled in stone.

How could anyone think then, that The Bible could possibly be a recollection of actual events? The mind is a terrible records keeper and these stories were passed down for hundreds of years before ever being written down. I can't even keep my own memoirs factual if I don't write them within a year or so.

But I didn't come here to bitch about The Bible. I just got sidetracked for a minute. I have been getting friend requests from people on Facebook lately who I vaguely recall, but don't have the slightest modern image of other than what's on their page. It's weird. I am looking at a picture of someone that I spent probably 12 years of my life with, and all I can think of is that I was afraid of him in elementary school because he had a black belt in Karate by like age 10. What is that all about? Why is that the only thing that comes to mind?

People, like memories, come in and out of our lives. They do more going out than they do coming in. I have lived in several different towns and worked with several groups of people who were my temporary best friends. It seems like such a waste to know someone intimately for just a short period and then lose contact. I would drink and play pool with my Applebuddies when we were in college. I have lost track of nearly every single one of them now. I worked with many nice and interesting people in Richmond during my residence there, but now that they're out of sight, they're out of mind, and how far down have their memories gone in my head? How twisted have they become? I knew and thought I had a good relationship with most of the people at my warehouse in Tennessee, and I remember them pretty vividly now since that was only several months ago. How will their records change in my thoughts? What will I recall incorrectly next?

When the person is no longer around for any sort of direct contact, your memory is free to embellish or detract or do whatever it wants with that person's file in your head. How do you know that the way you remember them and their actions, or their friendship, or disdain, or character are accurate? You probably filed it all away like the plot of some movie that you haven't seen in a long time. They seem familiar to you at first, but then surprise you with complexity and depth that you didn't remember.

But then again, maybe that's just me. Maybe I focus too much on minutiae and swim around too much in my own head, and I'm a shallow prick. Either way, please keep in touch so I don't remember you inaccurately years from now.

Paco