So I still haven't blogged about Legends. And at this point it's becoming clear to me that I'm not going to. And that saddens me, because Legends was a big part of my Fall. It was a lot of good times, and it was what I looked forward to. And the way my memory works I live with the constant terror that if I don't do my best to transform some of the experience into words then they will quickly fade. I hate that. And worse, I hate that what will be left is the washed-out tableaux of memories I have consciously rehearsed. Rehearsed so that I won't forget them, because sooner or later I forget nearly everything. But memory is a weirdly analog medium, because each reviewing distorts the memory, until you're not sure what you're remembering is even real anymore.
I have long been aware of this phenomenon, because as I've noted I've got a sort of wonky memory. Around five years ago I had the problem elucidated for me in a freshman psychology course. Psych 101, I believe. My professor tersely debunked the concept or repressed memories and explained that, with enough time and the right effort, you could make yourself remember anything. The mind is that powerful. And the process is often completely obscured from you, which is why eye witness testimony is so frustratingly slippery from a legal standpoint. You want to believe it's true. Juries want to believe it's true. They sit in the jury box and watch a person on the stand earnestly recounting what they believe to be true. And they want to assign credibility to it, in direct proportion to how credible the witness seemed. But memory isn't static or scientific, and because of that any serious investigator will take a single blurry photograph over an eye witness any day of the week.
Its worth noting that somewhere in vaguely the same period the movie
Memento came out and provided concrete examples of the concept. Remember Sammy Jenkis. Memento showed me in black and white the way in which memory could be distorted and created, both by conscious rehearsal but also by the mere process of remembering. It's maddening, really. The more you enjoy a memory and want to cherish it, the less often you ought to call it to mind. Or you ought to write it down as soon as you can, when it's fresh, capture your impressions in some format that isn't going to change. So that even if the memory changes you can trust the words, because they are in a sense etched in stone. This, for the curious, is where we came in. The farther you pass in time from the memory, the more reliable the words become then your mind.
I was in college when I learned all of this. College, which I've already lost the ability to recall clearly. I have a sense of what it was like, of course, but I can feel that sense gradually becoming more and more artificial. Like going to the cupboard where you have stashed away a fine bar of dark chocolate only to discover that time has somehow transmuted it into a waxy unappetizing Hershey bar. I look back at my blog entries from that time and find I don't connect with them the way I used to. They don't read like me, somehow. I can identify that they were written by me, about the events of my life, but apparently I was different back then from the way I am now. Which is one of those truths that are so frustratingly simple that it often fails to occur to me. I can be pretty stupid that way.
I'm not doing this right. I blog about what movies I've seen, about my opinions on popular media. And that's all well and good, and it serves its purpose. It articulates my thoughts and keeps me writing, and sometimes the people reading even take a moment to respond. And that's what that is all about, honestly, so I keep at it, shouting across the abyss and hoping what I've said is interesting enough to merit replies instead of frustrating silence. But I look at the blogs I really love, the blogs of
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
demiurgent,
the_ferrett and
rollick. And a good portion of what they do is tell stories. New stories, old stories. Funny things that happened to them, snippets of conversation or just impressions of their day. They share them with the world and they preserve them against the erosion of memory that will inevitably come with time.
I've had an interesting year, and a good one. But you wouldn't necessarily know it to look back over my entries. It's becoming clear to me that I have utterly missed the point. Because there are milestones that have passed without recording or celebrating. Halloween parties and late nights at LARP and crazy road trips and old friends and new friends and so much more. A year's worth of moments. And I didn't take photos and I didn't write it down and now I am absolutely terrified that it might as well be gone already. That ten years from now I will look back at this time after college and remember it fondly, and a little wistfully, and completely without meaningful detail. That at some point someone with a sharper mind than mine will make reference to something that happened and it will pass me by entirely.
"Remember that guy 'Mingo from Legends?" they'll say. "We hung out with him at the Spook Walk that first Fall. And his girlfriend, or was it wife-- what was her name, Carrie? She got dressed up in werewolf gear with
sleetfall and was acting like such a goofy nut!"
And I'll say. "It rings a faint bell." And it will. But meaningfully it will be gone.
I love stories. I'm obsessed with stories. Half my obsessive impetus to game comes from the desire to just tell a good story, to get involved in it not only passively but as a creator. So why don't I write down stories about me? I can tell a funny story at a party with the best of them, so why on earth am I not transcribing these things while I still have them? One of the best entries I ever wrote, hands down, back when I first got into making regular entries in this blog, was the
story of my ill-fated attempt to buy pants late at night in Cologne. How long has it been since I told a good story like that? How is it possible that I've let this blog turn into anything other than the Story of Me? Lesson learned, I guess. I love my friends and I've had such fun this year and the closest I've come to capturing any of it is probably a
measly three-line entry quoting something that had already been posted twice. Where's the sense in that?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pooka_madness sent to me...
