"I'll squash a fucking grapefruit in ya fucking face ya moll"
That's what I said to my memory after it again failed to summon up the resemblance of what I did only two days ago.
"How has your weekend been?" asks a well-meaning friend.
Ummm... No idea. Can't remember. Even though the oldest memories I'd have to dust off are in the region of 48 hours.
"Hey! I'm the fucking boss here Chachi - you're here for my benefit! And if I say jump to and remind me what Friday night consisted of, you goddamn well jump! Capishe?"
But no dice.
So what chance do I have over years, or decades. When I'm trying to piece together a picture of What Has Happened To Me So Far for the benefit of a new doctor or nurse (wink wink), for example.
The emotional continuum is there, and by all means that is one - very valid - kind of history. But it isn't rated as much authenticity as factual, chronological continuum. Unfortunately the facts are more elusive than they seem. Just because it is the historical truth doesn't mean it is privileged in memory.
Most of my accounts of the past are accurate on emotion and vague on detail. Does it matter? Not to me, but people think they can know you by what has happened to you.
So on the occasions when it is necessary to tell the stories, and my memory puts up doughnuts, I have fleshed out my reliable emotional memory with some unreliable 'facts'. They may be historically accurate, they may not.
But people want a story to hang their ideas of you on, and emotional honesty often doesn't cut it. We'd love it to, but we hunger for a narrative of events for our picture of people. I'm admitting that sometimes I fudge it. Some things might be too painful to accurately revive, others so subsumed by the associated emotion that accurate accounting has long been rendered moot.
But in the end, if it is true to how it felt, do the details matter so much? Well, maybe they do, which is bad news for a chump like me with a monkey behind the memory desk.
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