I Can't Forget
I am not especially bright. Before you protest (and thank you, it is as appreciated as it is unnecessary) I want to assure you that this is an assessment I have made relatively recently, after years of believing otherwise. But with the passing of time, and the firm hand of reality smacking me repeatedly about the face, I have been forced to admit something I only subconsciously suspected for so long: Knowing stuff is nice, but it doesn’t really count for much, particularly now that everyone has something they hold in their hand that knows a million more things than I do and can, unlike me, recall them at will.
But surely, you say, all the learning you did counts for something? This, my friend, is where you’re wrong. The thing that I have that most people do not, the thing that gives me the illusion of brilliance that you were so kind as to remark on just a paragraph ago, is actually an impressive (and oppressive) memory. I am not, thank the Lord, Marilu Henner, but for some inexplicable reason I am unable to forget almost anything. This, as you can imagine, is a terrible burden, and would be a terrible burden for anyone, but is particularly awful for someone who says as many idiotic things as I do: You could spend an entire evening paralyzed by the memory of something stupid you said in junior high. For God’s sake, you could have a recurring episode of debilitation where you recalled a moment when you were four and your mom asked you if you minded if she had a bite of your cake and you said yes because you weren’t sure how the construction of “do you mind” quite worked yet and you thought saying yes was telling her that she could, but she took it as you being selfish or rude and gave you a heartbreaking look of disappointment that would eventually become crushingly familiar in multiple faces but was then especially painful due to its novelty, a sensation that stings just as strongly forty years on each time the old memory carousel decides to project it on the back of your brain.
In any event, I am the victim of a persistent memory, and the only side benefit is it seems like a I know a lot because so much sticks. (In truth, everything I know I’ve known forever. The only new stuff I’ve learned is exactly how dumb I am.) That is little consolation when the content industry has decided the only other marketable commodity apart from rage is nostalgia. (In the last week I have seen: an oral history of George magazine, the voluminous collection of recollections around Kurt Cobain’s suicide anniversary and a 30th birthday commemoration of Say Anything. Not to get off topic but I think we should have our legislators establish some standards when it comes to regurgitating the past for traffic: 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50 should be the only denominations we allow the wistful jubilee industry to blast out on any topic; after 50 years no one is marketable as a click so if you want to do a piece pegged to the 83rd anniversary of the Crystal Palace fire or whatever knock yourself out, I hope you can get it past your social media manager.) Being constantly reminded of things you remember anyway is doubly insulting. In fact, my memory is even worse for not being retroactively fact-checked, which is to say whatever dumb thing I was thinking when I first made the memory is the way my mind keeps the thought in perpetuity. Which is why something like this is so terrible.
You may have seen this at some point recently. Or maybe not, I don’t know what your social media diet is like. I didn’t, because as I never tire of telling anyone after waiting exactly one minute to seem polite and then just faux-casually (but with an air of superiority that I barely bother to suppress anymore) announcing, I am not on the platforms. So, in an act of betrayal that will be difficult to forgive, I only found out when an alleged friend emailed it to me. Of course, this is a friend I went to high school with, which means we were actually there when it happened. And that is actually what I’d like to talk to you about today.
The phrase that has gone through my head with depressing regularity of late is, “This is where I came in.” I do not mean to belabor the strange ways in which history compresses itself the closer you come to death, because that is what everyone who gets to be my age does, but it is astounding how events suddenly seem to be jammed up against each other as you watch time expire. When I was in high school learning about the war in Vietnam it clearly took place a thousand years ago, but of course it was still going on as I was being born. The difficulty I’ve had in dealing with the recent run of documentaries centered around the ‘80s and ‘90s isn’t that I know the reason they’re being made is because there’s so much video footage from that time available, it’s because I remember it from the first time around. And they’re not even letting a decent amount of time elapse before cranking out recreations. The idea that I would spend $15 to go see a movie about Dick Cheney when I’m still spitting mad about having to sit through the real thing in real time is absurd to me. I watched the actual White Bronco Chase, how many of my remaining hours am I expected to give up to Ryan Murphy and Ezra Edelman’s versions?
I brought the Wilburys tweet up to a mixed group of friends, and the youngest person there expressed some confusion over the point of it. “They were old and that was a while ago so now they're dead,” was her takeaway. But oh, my young friend, they were only old then! The old that they were then is shockingly young NOW. I remember New York’s WNEW (the dominant classic rock station in an era of classic rock dominance) playing each just-released track as if someone had discovered a new Gospel and was putting it out one chapter at a time, because the fact that these giant guys from THE SIXTIES (with Orbison and Petty at either end)—THE SIXTIES! A decade which our parents and TV told us was the most amazing ten consecutive years ever!—were in a band together was an amazing thing. Reagan was still president and there was still an Iron Curtain. U2 had only recently become the biggest band in the world. Fox was only broadcasting two nights a week. We were still months away from “Me So Horny.” There wasn’t much else to distract us then.
But you see where I’m going with this, right? These memories are vivid and valuable to me because they coincide with my development of conscious awareness (to the extent that I ever developed such a thing; I refer you to the previous part of this email that explains my lack of intelligence). The reflective reminders of these things are tough to take because that’s where I came in. And, now that I am on the way out, their sheer insignificance, the way I got them wrong at the time, the way it doesn’t matter whether those guys were old then or not, is what’s so painful about them. And this is not some sublimated fear of death. (Please. Death would be welcome. Death is what has replaced sex as the subject of fantasy when my aging brain seeks something to soothe it to sleep in the dark of night.) It is about recognizing how much time I’ve spent valorizing things that just don’t matter. It’s about realizing how little anything matters. And mostly it is about the irrefutable understanding of just how dumb I’ve been all this time. That is what hurts the most. The only consolation is now that I know it, I can finally say I know everything. And I’m sure that is something I’ll feel forever.
Okay, thank you, that’s all I’ve got. This, by the way, is not the actual newsletter. That is going to be something that occurs more frequently and is even less coherent than what happened here today. It’s the only way I’ll write this idiot book people are making me write. I am warning you about it now because I think you should unsubscribe before things get really ugly. And this is not me being adorably self-deprecating, it’s gonna get bad, no joke. Do it. Unsubscribe. Alright, you have been warned. I appreciate your attention.