Forgetting in Buy a Ticket, Take a Ride

It’s been so long since I’ve tried to write. More than a month. Since then my writemonkey settings profile has become corrupted and thus developed a bug that erased my words randomly as I try to write them. Re-importing my profile that I had saved fixed the problem.

I’ve been full of acid frequently. I feel inspired even when not actively on it such as while I’m writing this now. As a direct result of doing more acid, I’m more creative. I’m feeling the temptation to interpret an event like this bug as a meaningful event, a reflection of the reluctance I feel. It’s absurd, but makes writing more interesting, to specifically choose anecdotes that when interpreted abstractly thematically support what I feel even when the direct correlation is absent.

I feel like this temptation is not just how false correlations and superstitions are made, but actually a structure of storytelling, as collection of scenes are not strictly interpreted as a series of causal events inevitably received as a metaphor by the reader even if the writer did not intend it as I am describing. No one really creates a new thing, only a very slight variation all made of parts of things we have already absorbed and do not always understand. But to understand, and purposefully create the metaphor, is probably a good goal.

So for a long work, even if a discussion and not a story, repetition is useful to develop the metaphors or the concepts. Demonstrating one consistent interpretation, or even conveying multiple different interpretations, possibly contradicting or contrasting each other, but each variation somehow more insightful from being compared to or related to the others somehow, is an essential practice of communication that the internal constant monologue exercises constantly.

Internally, it performs for an audience of just yourself, specifically a part of yourself which is a collection of ideas made of all your expectations of what other people are like. This complex is called the Other even though it is not an other thing from yourself, it is actually a part of yourself that is being imagined by yourself. So this monologue begins during development as we learn to communicate and become verbal, and as we form the capacity to imagine possible actions to take and their consequences before we perform them, we begin to form memories and thus develop our concepts of permanence and develop our ability to plan. This constant monologue is necessary not only to understand ourselves but how we plan to communicate with others.

Through the process of communication we learn we are an individual mind that is separate from other minds. We form communities, alliances and conflicts when we distinguish ourselves from everyone but some more than others when we also associate ourselves with familiar and friendly entities and distance ourselves from those who are different and/or our enemies.

As we form the details of our identity, always performing for the other as part of a process constantly constructing multiple identities. Minds, simultaneously creating language to describe reality, are limited in their ability to perceive reality by the possibilities that have previously been communicated to them. This is because only a single moment can be observed empirically, this moment is infinitely smaller than any unit of time we can comprehend, and instantly this moment becomes a memory that can only be interpreted unreliably. And this interpretation becomes part of an identity when we communicate it to someone else, remembering and especially describing makes a memory of a condition that no longer actually exists feel more real to us.

Thus, when our prevailing identities change and then also the reasons why we make decisions change, we might have a hard time remembering what we were thinking or maybe say we weren’t even thinking at all. It is a little more difficult, but not unlikely given sufficient time, motivation, or some mind-altering substances… a complex working understanding of memory requires the memory to be repeatedly and meaningfully related to other concepts such as identity, but if it’s not important to you anymore or if it’s something scary to think about, you can forget or repress. You can forget you did a thing after you no longer understand why you did it, or a thing that happened to you after you no longer relate it meaningfully to other parts of your mind but in particular identity, potentially in part because you no longer understand why you did it or because the person you think you are has changed…