Delicious Ketchup.

Speaking of memory: the physical memory of touch is far more intense to me than any visual or smell or sound. My friend Aether took it upon themselves to braid my hair while I was running the Morsbergers open mic on Father’s Day. I haven’t had someone casually braid my hair in a while, but it was certainly a common enough thing when I was Aether’s age. It’s probably a principle reason I kept my hair long when I was younger. It’s just a primate thing.

Sometimes I wonder about doing these catchup posts, going back and just thinking “okay, these photos never found their way up, but I don’t really have a coherent story” and just posting them all together. Surely no-one else thinks the repeated pun is funny, but I amuse me. And I guess when it comes down to it, I’m realizing that ALL of this is for ME.

As I get older, and especially as I’ve had to be so hands-on with the Journal recently, I’ve spotted the signs. In jokes. Memory triggers. Things I’m actually afraid of talking about that I talk around. And then more importantly I spot the gaps in time, but I don’t remember what happened. I’ve wondered if I’m really Living if I can’t remember the moments.

Wednesday we went to get Jeff Miller’s guitar worked on. I’m tentative about telling you where. I’ve had some good experiences with this shop, but some bad ones too. Our decision to get the work done there had more to do with proximity and optimism than a specific full-hearted recommendation and I feel kind of guilty about that. The guy at the shop treated Jeff’s request with mild contempt and then had told him he was going to charge a previously-undisclosed “expedition fee” (not pronounced like “expedite” but pronounced like “expedition into your guitar”). Jeff was like “Hey, you said same-day turnaround on the phone but didn’t mention THAT” and they quickly waived it, only to turn around and do additional work that quickly blew almost a hundred dollars past the initial estimate and Jeff STILL wasn’t really happy with the work. Why the picture of the spiders, though, I hear you ask? Well – while Jeff was trying out his freshly-set-up guitar that… was a LITTLE better than he’d left it… I went to the rest room and watched a bunch of spiders hatch. The knowledge that these guitar guys were now proud spider pappas went a little way towards feeling there was some bit of justice in the universe.

I get it – Heather’s memory is scarily perfect. I’ve slowly learned to view this as a feature, not a bug, especially now that we’re some 20 years past having dated, but even when you’re not fearing the perfect memory of your GIRLFRIEND bringing up some random thing you said to refute your current argument, Heather’s memory still rears it’s head at inopportune moments. For every time I’m incredibly grateful that she remembers a fan’s name and how many cats they have, I’m also mortified when she’ll bring up some half-remembered embarrassing story to rib me over our decades together.

I know not everyone’s memory is as steel-trap-adjacent as Heather’s is – but I don’t think everyone’s quite as hazy as I am. And I don’t THINK it’s a recent development. Though I’ve always been good with methods and instructions and STORIES, the specifics have always escaped me (I have no idea why the exception to this is Warhammer stats). I can remember the narrative, but rarely the name. I can’t remember a script but I can remember an outline. I can remember the view but not the date. And images from my past are often not memories, but memories ingrained from the photographs that I’ve pored over – through the Journal.

And SO. Reading back through a page, do I remember the event? Or do I remember the entry? And if I don’t remember it at all – did I Live it or just lose the time?

I guess I better keep writing things down so that I’ve got something to remember me by…