Thursday, December 23, 2004
The Best Story I Never Wrote
I was reminded of it a month or so ago when pea wrote about how she tricked herself into trying to remember a bit of dreamed dialogue, and woke up with a mental bookmark that had slipped out in the night, telling her only that she’d forgotten what she’d intended to remember. But at least she remembered to write about that. That’s better than I usually do.
I carry a little memo pad (or two) with me, just in case I have some sort of notion I’d like to hold on to. I also carry a writing book in case I get a chance to flesh anything out into complete sentences. I make occasional wordpad notes on a spare screen while at work, too, and I write on my hands and forearms and stuff my pockets with little loose notelets. YET I FORGET. Barely a day goes by when something doesn’t get past me - a scrap of a dream, a terrible pun, a poignant vignette, the first line of the best story I never wrote.... In every case, I promise myself that this one is too obvious, too beautiful, too witty to get stuck in the lint trap that is my ADD, and that I therefore won’t need to take the momentary effort to transcribe my thoughts into some less evanescent form. Not a note; not a word; not a crude bleary doodle. I’ll just remember, I tell myself.
I can be so full of crap sometimes. I never remember a goddamn thing. I even had to force myself to write down my ideas about forgetting things so I could make sure to touch on them all here.
The insidious thing is, once I’ve written some notes down, I don’t usually need to check them again. If I’ve gone through the whole exercise of writing something out completely, working it through all from start to finish (as I did with this little essay), of course I’ll type it up faithfully - I won’t wing what needn’t be wung. But if it’s just a matter of a few words, the literary equivalent of the string-tied-around-my-finger, once I write it down somewhere it sticks to my brains tenaciously till I’ve sublimated it out in some sort of finished product or have formally dismissed it as unworthy of further attention.
Try to remember? Invariably forget. Write it down so I don’t forget? Never need to look at it again. Not enough effort, or more than necessary. If I ever figure out how to gauge my behavior to my needs, I’d get a lot more done and I’d have lots of extra energy too. And plenty of fresh notebooks, to boot. Meanwhile, if you see an absentminded dude patting himself down for paper and pen while you’re trying to get around him on the bus, give him a break. He might not remember it, but he’ll sure appreciate it.
Ed. note: I’m gonna take a few days off for the Saturnalia, and next week I travel to the east coast for to party with the inlaws in Maryland. Posting will be light till 2005. After that, god only knows what the future will bring - but I do have a lot of crap written down in those ratty little notebooks....
