I was recently reminded of how little I remember about my own life by someone I’ve only known through email for about ten years now. She remembers all sorts of ridiculous insane manner of things I’ve written to her that I have absolutely no recollection or even vague memory of thinking much less going through the trouble of typing to another human being.

What’s curious is that the poor memory is only of my own life. Just ask me about any sort of information that doesn’t concern me, foreign policy, cooking, computers, bicycles, film, art, books, hydrological features of the American southwest) and I’m a fucking font of useless information. The blind spot of my mind is my life. The effect of this is that I’m not actually living my life, experiencing my life, noticing, feeling, breathing, bathing in my own experiences.

Apparently I’m one funny motherfucker when I write without thinking about it and I have no connection at all to this experience. I know intellectually that I write, I type and it goes away and then I’m left like a new born baby, tabula rasa, a clean slate of a mind.

I’m washing my own brain clean every day.

I’m starting to wonder what else I’m missing. Do I have another life somewhere? Am I an insurance adjuster in Iowa with a wife, two…no three! kids (Chuck is gonna be an amazing football player one day), driving a great big truck and sporting a love of NASCAR in the spare time my brain seems to have? What else could I be forgetting?

Now the even more curious thing is that I have memories. It’s not like every moment of my day is missing when I think about it. It’s just that I’m doing OTHER stuff (writing, talking, moving about physical space) at the same time and that’s not getting recorded in my brain.

I’m only halfway in consciousness. Is everyone else in total consciousness? How did I miss that in kindergarten?

Or maybe, like in a complex film story there are all sorts of subplots and hidden agendas in my life. Maybe there’s a dark secret hidden in my past. Could it be that I was brainwashed by Communists when I was in the Army Rangers on a reconnaissance mission near Hong Kong? This might explain my strange desire to learn Chinese and have sex with large breasted red headed Chinese girls.

Could it be that I was never even in the Army and that I’m lying comatose in a bed somewhere after a ridiculous bicycle crash while I was zoooooming through Manhattan on my way to work at the ad agency oh so many years ago? How do I know what’s really my life if I can’t even remember any of what other people seem to have perfect retention?

If this were fiction it would be a thriller. Who am I? What’s the truth, the conflict and the revelation? The camera movements have been a little languid for my own tastes but I appreciate the framing and “look” of my life. The production designer did an amazing job with my apartment, keeping it simple, colorless, sparse and devoid of anything that could trigger a real memory.

Amazing how little my own life touches my life. I’ve got to get a handle on this otherwise I’ll be dead for months before I know about it.