At some point when you ponder the unlikely experience of living for significantly longer than a human being should live, such as Forever, it crosses your mind that such an experience would drive one mad and ultimately ruin itself. Perhaps you don’t think it would be a problem, but I myself foresee them. Unless there is no memory, or if there is a periodic wiping of memory, it might be hard to contain everything. Too much memory in one place seems a source of madness to me, but as long as it’s out with the old, in with the new- it could persist.
I was busy not catching any fish yesterday to the sound, finally, of silence- honeycrisp apple in one hand, limp fishing pole in the other- and I considered that animated gif of a moment one of a number of moments I have experienced thus far in life that could easily serve as a ‘heaven’ eternity to me, so long as I didn’t remember that I had been there for infinity years and so long as I felt like I was always in a narrow moment right between coming and going. That’s not the heaven I would choose if I could. I have better heavens than that, but it functions as a template.
I have an odd relationship with Memory. Part of me cherishes it above all else, part of me wishes to discard it at every opportunity.
If you were around in the 80s, do you remember the generation of sweaty 70s people we watched on daytime TV in shows like CHiPS and Gunsmoke? I think about those people and those carpets and bad sound effects all the time. I remember being a child, inside the remnants of worlds stacked upon worlds, watching this dulling snapshot of a nearly-passed generation roll by on the barely-watched morning hours of Television programming that only old ladies and kids who were home from school got to see. I think about how fast they all vanished completely with their culture right after that, or perhaps a bit before.
I think about my loveless house, how beautiful it is- but also cold. And I compare it to the section 8 housing complex I worked at, and the handful of tiny overcrowded ‘crummy’ government subsidized apartments there teeming with life, and love, and family- and it’s a reminder that stuff and aesthetic is meaningless without that warm core of love and family and trust. There as a tenant there that I adopted as a second mother- Momo, she went by, and she had several very small children always watching cartoons and having snacks and just being alive happy kids in general, and she would make me coffee, and I’d sit there on the clock and hang out with all of them for a good half hour every day.
Haven’t been back in 6 or 7 years now, and it’s the last place I felt a genuine sense of a warm and maternally kept ‘home.’ My family- that being myself, my sister, my brother, my other brother, and their respective spouses (and eventually- kids) would meet at my parents house on Sunday for various dinners. When my parents would leave for the winter, we would keep the tradition at their house every weekend, taking turns cooking, and we would chat with them on the phone while we visited. We played a lot card games, a lot of board games. Watched movies sometimes together, played with the animals. That felt like maternal home too.
I think about those endless Sunday nights, all the time. Probably for a decade, we did that as a family. I don’t know how I ended up in a place without any semblance of that feeling left. Life now feels like a bad dream I might have had as a young man. And yet, from this one, I visit other dreams- dreams of new futures, and new beginnings. New eternities so that I may forget the old.
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