Note to self
In my tattered take-it-with-me-everywhere Claire Fontaine spiral bound, graph paper notebook, I have some writing and lots of ideas. I have lists of things -- I'm a list maker -- not the least of which are all my to-do lists. I draw checkboxes next to the to-do items (this is really not as anal as it sounds) which I scribble in if I've done whatever it is that I'm supposed to or want or need to remember to do. On a page in my book that had several notes to self about various things written some time in June, I'd written "cactus/polaroids" with a really nice pen. It had a checkbox next to it, unchecked. It was something I wanted to do; an idea I'd thought of.
I can't say here what cactus/polaroids is because it's a really good idea I had (I have lots of ideas) and someone would probably steal it. I'm not saying "someone" like someone specific. I'm saying the general someone. Anyone. Anyone who might be reading this. That's not paranoia (and it's really not as neurotic as it sounds) and I'm not saying that my idea, or ideas, are the best ideas, but some of them are pretty fucking good and it's always the same way when you come across a really great idea and someone's already done it. You wish you'd thought of it first. It's possible that you might have been the first person to ever think of it, but you'll never know that. What matters anyway is making something out of it. Sometimes I really do say to a friend, "I have the BEST idea for a __________." And when I say "best" in those moments I really do mean it. Although sometimes it turns out that "best" really refers to my best intentions rather than it being an accurate description of the actual idea. Do you know what I'm saying?
Over the course of the last several months I'd forgotten to do a lot of things. I don't mean things like laundry or feeding the cat or rushing to pick up illegally prescribed painkillers from the pharmacy before it closes. I mean, forgetting about a lot of ideas, seeds planted for projects and trials and explorations. It's a vague kind of forgetting that's neither laziness nor disinterest. Maybe it's not forgetting them as much as it is letting them go and slip away somewhere. They're the things that get swept away under the couch, carried on the backs of drifting dust bunnies to lay with the pocket change, the tissues, that one sock, the wavy plastic ring toy thingies that the cat chased under there and then immediately had no idea where they were, as if they were ghosts. And then what are they? All the cactus/polaroids are just floating around in your head, pushed back and aside for all the other things you're sticking in there until you remember them again. You let go of when and where you first or last thought of them. You forgot to remember.
So what I think is that you have to decide to remember them. It's a choice you make like thinking you can't find the place where you put your fucking keys. You'll find them. Or, you can not find them and just sit in the house all day. Or instead, you can find them, have them in your hand, pretty sure you're ready to walk out the door and then you decide to just sit down and you pretend not to notice all the crap that's built up under the very couch that you're sitting on. And that particular idea or plan or whatever brilliant light walked in and blinded you for a moment and made you grab your Claire Fontaine and write down that phrase or idea or word or words like it would turn back time for you or make the time pass quicker? Well, here it is six months later with the big fat blank checkbox next to it. You don't really even fucking know what cactus/polaroids is, was supposed to be, or could have been at all, (it wasn't about buying a cactus or taking polaroids of one -- you don't even have a polaroid) or whether it could have been, whatever it meant, the best idea you ever had. What if it really was the best thing you could have had? Unlikely, right?
When I sat down at the keys to write this I had a plan, an idea. I was going to write about the span of time during which I let things be forgotten, which I did. But I was going to end with the fact that one of those things was the three year anniversary of my web site, which was on September 1st. So I was going to decide, because I made the decision to pass over it when it was really here, that today would be my third anniversary instead. And I was going to say happy birthday to Bazima and I was going to refer to an as of yet unmade list of things that I really need for Christmas and suggest that they could be combination Bazima birthday/Christmas gifts. It was going to be reminiscent of that Steve Martin sketch where he says that if he could only have one wish for Christmas it would be to save all the starving children of the world. Then he realizes that if he could only have one wish it would probably have to be peace on earth, that way we could save the starving children. Saving the starving children would be second. You know where that story goes, don't you? I remember laughing out loud at the TV when, at the end, he goes through the whole exhaustive mental list he's labored over and says, "and then there's that crap about the hungry kids..." It's only funny if you've seen it or, if I was to act out my own version of it in person. That would be funny. But that's not where all of this tapping away at the keys has led. I had different ideas about how things would go.
