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Memory Powers Activate Posting Date: May 25 2008 11:43PM Two weeks ago, I sat down to write a SundayMonkey. I got started, but either ran out of steam or got distracted or something, so I only composed the first 247 words. There I paused, thinking I would come back, rejoin the flow and finish things off.
I never did. Here is what remains of that would-be column …
There’s an economist out there called Barry Asmus. He has his own website, which he probably thinks is pretty cool. There are photographs of him on the site and he looks pretty much like you would expect an economist who insists on calling himself “Barry Asmus PhD” to look, which is to say, not very handy with the ladies and also not so good with the jokes. Turns out, that’s not the case at all (at least on the jokes), for it was Barry Asmus PhD who once said of his professional brethren, “Economists are pessimists; they have predicted eight of the last three depressions.”
Economics is the “science” famous for its affinity to weather forecasting and there’s the well-worn joke about four lawyers and four economists taking a train to a tax conference with the lawyers coming out on the good side of the joke, so you know there isn’t a lot of love out there for Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and the other famous economist, whoever he may be. So you’d think that being an economist would pretty much suck. No one takes anything you say seriously, your colleagues disagree with you half the time you open your mouth, and you generally work in the bowels of monolithic institutions like banks and governments in rooms with no windows (I can’t confirm the no windows part).
But this isn’t the case. In fact, economists are the deep thinkers of our time. Where once
And that’s where it ends. Stops dead. The phone probably rang or the baby cried or something and I just saved the fledgling column as it is above and thought, “I’ll finish this later.”
Except I have absolutely no idea where I was planning to take things. Clearly, I wasn’t planning on writing a whole column about economists. Who wants that? I obviously had some sort of twist in mind at the time, and that twist has long disappeared into the untapped bowels of my memory.
It makes you wonder about the way your mind works, it does. There’s a popular belief out there that our brains work like some sort of black box recording device that digitizes everything we see, think and experience and the only limitations we have are in our ability to recall, not our ability to store. This is why people believe in recovered memories (like our heads are 100 gigabyte hard drives holding accidentally deleted files), hypnosis and those flashback sequences you see in bad thrillers where a main character suddenly remembers in absolute detail something like whether or not there was mud on the butler’s shoes six weeks ago.
My brain doesn’t work like that. I think my powers of recall are fine. It’s the storage mechanism that’s faulty. In the case of the economist column, I just forgot to hit the “Save” button. Forgot completely.
Some things I have programmed for “Autosave.” These include sports statistics, golf shots I have hit, sit-com dialogue, movie dialogue, movie credits, driving directions, people’s faces and the answers to most questions in the original Trivial Pursuit game.
Here are the things I have set for “Auto-don’tsave.” You will notice this is a much larger list: the location of my keys, my sister’s phone number, the location of my wallet, my social insurance number, the second-to-last item on any grocery list, the location of the cordless phone, most people’s names, the place I put anything I decide is important enough to have a special place, how to spell “comraderie” / “commraderie” / “commaraderie” (see, I’m pretty sure none of those are correct … just looked it up, it’s “camaraderie” … who the hell can remember that?), and of course, how to finish a column that starts with two paragraphs on economists.
Obviously, I need to start writing things down. |
