Word nerd
jpalma@theguidon.com

Essentially, we’re all married to our past hang-ups. It may have been a traumatizing slip at the canteen, or that particularly special time you were in black slacks with accentuating off-white pinstripes and, heaven forbid, white socks like a retro Wacko Jacko—bottom line: while those stories serve experiential and anecdotal purposes, they stick like glue.

After each and every time a stupid situation like it comes our way, we do our best to move on. Or at least we say we do, mostly for the sake of conversation and self-pride. What’s come to my attention is that any and all measures taken to erase, nay, rectify any and all hang-ups are exponentially but not definitively stupid.

There are those darkhour weekdays when I find myself in furious mental monologuing, deciding which is the acest direction to orient myself. Purge or pursue? Let it slip away or “let’s sleep on it”?

The thing to do would be to press on forward. Let future experience take the reins and overhaul my entire mindset. Perhaps all the new windows and opportunities to be recorded might straighten things out.

But in no time, we all find that in marginalizing the very thoughts of the past is equivalent to thinking about them. It’s a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t kind of philosophy kicking in. It’s all mature and post-modern of someone to acknowledge these feelings only to hopefully cancel them out eventually; however, the self-denial is nothing short of ridiculous.

Keeping them raw in the most explicit regions of your consciousness isn’t an option either, since you wanted them out of there anyway, right? So, scratch that off your chart, Melissa.

Memory’s funny. And much like every other seemingly-simple-but-in-reality-it-isn’t thing in this screwy world, it loves the color gray.

I dream about a lot of things, crazy-impossible things. But it’s been a while since I’ve actually sat down and really thought about something. If I had my way—hypothetically speaking of course—and had piles of money like a rich, playboy type modern day Howard Hughes with obviously crazy ideas and a lot of spare time, I’d craft a machine for the mind.

What would it do? Easy. It would isolate a particular memory. Then by some made-up process my army of researchers would conjure up, the device would edge out all the unnecessary factors besmirching that thought and whittle it down to a single thread. And that thread would be the single most important thing you should have taken away from it. In the end, you’d be smarter and significantly less mopey than you would have if you had the whole barrage of intricacies hewn into the thought. Brilliant, I thought.

It’s ring and it’s like flunking the Math test was merely a lesson in prioritization.

It’s crash and it’s like the $1,000 antique vase you dropped isn’t a big deal.

It’s snap and it’s like the two of you never met in the first place.