I’ve grown suspect of my memories over the years. I have a supposedly “great” memory, or so I have been told by those around me. My younger self was proud of this. I always could remember the date of that one party when so-and-so fell asleep on the porch, or what I was wearing when you taught me to play pitch, or exactly when you lit a cigarette when we were in the middle of an argument. It made for effective storytelling and I recounted things again and again. Most of the time just to myself. Going back to when I was little kid, I remember, on nights when I had difficulty falling asleep, trying to relive my favorite memories EXACTLY as they occurred. It was like putting on my favorite show. The first time I was invited to my friend Gina Sesto’s house, she showed me her clubhouse in the back, a small one-room structure with some rugs, a cabinet, and table and chair set. That day we played, we swept out the little house and beat the rugs on its tiny porch. I had so much fun, and Gina was nicer to me than anyone I had met outside of my family. For weeks, maybe months, I replayed that day in my head. I still rely on the technique from time to time. During particular sleepless and anxious nights I begin hiking the Kalalau Trail in Kauai, one foot in front of the other, up and down steep and beautiful slopes, much as I did in real life this past April on a trip to Hawaii.
However…
At some point in time when I was a kid I had a realization. I had thought what I was remembering was fact. I thought it was what I saw at the time of occurrence, as if there was a camera hidden in the pupil of my eye capturing everything I saw. But as I replayed these well worn memories over and over again I started noticing things.
The memories were evolving.
They must have been changing over time without my notice because when I went to “turn on” a memory I started seeing things that couldn’t have been recorded by my camera eye. Namely, I was seeing myself. I’d replay a memory, and I would see myself on Gina’s porch. I was laughing as I hung a small blue rug over the railing, playing house. Clearly I never saw that happen. The implications of this did not escape me. If I could invent these pictures accidently, then how was I to be certain that the rest of the images weren’t fake too? It was somehwhat disturbing to me at the time, but I kept it to myself and continued to enjoy my reputation for having a fabulous memory.
As an adult, I was reminded of this once again a few years ago when listening to a particular episode of Radiolab. (Do you like Radiolab? It’s fabulous.) This particular episode was called Memory and Forgetting (fair warning: the last segment will break your heart). This is when I learned that the memory most recalled is the most corrupted, in a way. You must recreate a memory every time you recall it, and the more you recall it the more you create. Memories are not recorded, they are imagined. There never was a camera in the pupil of my eye. There was only my imagination recreating my favorite days over and over. Conversely, the memories that are suddenly unlocked by a smell or song, a memory you haven’t recalled since it was first created, is the most trustworthy. These memories have not been amended and added to over time by your imagination.
As a painfully nostalgic person, this was a profound realization for me.
It was impossible to avoid thinking of this as we worked with the Lynda Barry writing technique to create I Am Saying This Right Now. The exercises unlocked some very vivid memories. Suddenly you remember that resting on your best friend’s desk was one of those plastic gumball machines, or you can suddenly see with all clarity the poison control center sticker stuck to the side of the rotary phone that used to be in your parents’ basement, or you suddenly remember a board that was loose on the deck of the house you grew up in. Details like this bob to the surface, plunging into air after years of being long forgotten… Are they actually forgotten details? They feel that way. It feels like the locations, people and events of your past are emerging in sudden clear focus, but if we are indeed reimagining events every time we recall them, these details could just be embellishments of the mind, stimulated by the creative exercises, filling in the empty spaces. Who knows?
I think, to a degree, we have always instinctually known this. If you want to accurately remember how something looked, you take a picture, you make a video. If you want to remember someone’s voice you record it, you save their voicemail messages. But this behavior can affect your memory too, I’ve noticed. When I think of high school, in most of memories I see myself and my friends wearing clothes that we are wearing in the pictures I have, behaving in the same way. I have memories of being a kid and meeting my cousins at a certain family reunion at my Great Grandmother’s house, but, after years of believing these memories, I was told by my mother that I wasn’t there. She had gone without me. But I thought I was there. But she must be right: the pictures in our family album, that I had looked at so many times, show no evidence of my presence.
Examining your memory too much can make you crazy. And looking for truth in memory is impossible. So, I have quit worrying about it and embrace the potential falsities in my mind’s remembrances. We should be grateful that we are automatically creative enough to fill in the missing holes in the pictures providing us a way to vividly feel the journey we’ve taken, allowing to elaborate on our past. Working with the writing exercises I was frequently aware that what I was writing couldn’t be what I actually experienced. There is no way I remember my childhood in such color. But it doesn’t actually matter.
What occurred in those memories contributed to who am today, and how I remember them is a part of who I am today. Writing for this show was a great opportunity to fictionalize events in my life, and I liked it.
I will leave you with a story by James Dunn, who was a part of our writing group. This is his memory of Washington Square Park in New York.
***
I am in Manhattan, but it’s actually just a park with a nook of steps and the Rastafarians are here to sell weed, which is perfect because I am here to buy some. Green, orange, gold and purple are the colors this August morning. I can smell the body odor from 20 feet. I have heard the weed here is good. Buy weed, get tattoo is all I seem to have to do today…And in Manhattan nobody gives a fuck if you buy weed right on 16th street. There is lots of music, but it all comes from tiny little boom boxes poking out of baskets filled with incense…that you better believe is for sale. My best pal Joey is with me…and he’s nervous. He wants to be with Ornette Coleman, not Bob Marley. But we both want weed and it’s cheap here…we’ve been told.
“Ay, boys. It’s a nice day, huh?’
“We want weed.”
“Okay. Hold on.” 50 dollars is exchanged. I am better at this than I ever thought and there are no pretty girls around.
Handshake comes, and minutes later I am so stoned…so completely stoned. High on drugs. I feel content, adult, horny, funny, young. I am really so happy and stoned and looking forward to the future I could cry. My skin felt tight. I was all muscle and sinew. I was in the ocean just yesterday. I can play the guitar pretty okay. I don’t want to play one, I just want that fact to swim around. Pretty soon I see a guy who has all the seven deadly sins tattooed on his back and a face representing each one. “Hey man. Where did you get those tattoos?”
“Fun City tattoos”
“We want to get tattoos today. Can you take us there?”
“For some weed.”
“Sure.”
He took us and we walked into the basement storefront. We explained what we wanted and each paid way too much for our tattoos. I got an Irish flag on my upper bicep and Joey got some horn rimmed glasses on his ankle.
Dimmingcync, 
