I set my alarm for six a.m., then did not wake up until eleven, then did not go to the med school until four. Then I left at seven, so I guess that makes three hours of “work” – if you can call it that.
I opened books to random places and skipped sections and read chapters backwards, just to keep myself from falling asleep.
I took frequent breaks in which I stared out the window at the parking garage, which is made of concrete and is totally uninteresting and in no way worth staring at.
So that was today. Now I guess I should go to sleep. When I wake up time will have jumped forward another arbitrary notch. February feels like the shortest month. That’s probably because it, uh, is. February had a beginning and an ending but there was no clear middle that I can remember.
I vaguely recall spending hours in the hospital. I remember many, many patients with cancer. I am sure these people had names. I can’t find those names now. I know they’re folded up somewhere inside my brain. I think everything that’s ever happened to me might be in there. Losing a memory is only losing access, and so on. Memories are created and never destroyed.
I don’t know how people keep all that data straight. You start building these towering trash-piles of memory from the moment you’re born. And you jump from pile to pile. You can make twenty, fifty, a million jumps in a single nanosecond. You connect and disconnect and assemble meaning, unless you can’t.
I don’t see a pattern. The signal has degraded. There’s just this hiss. No carrier. There’s this pulling back, this totality. I can’t integrate all the shit at once. I climb to the tallest trash-pile and look down and contemplate the screamingly vertiginous height and the mind-rending size of the fucking landfill within my brain.
It’s all landfill. There’s not anything beyond the landfill. The mountains in the distance are just more trash-piles. The sun is made of trash too. Space-time is made of trash. The electrons and protons and neutrons are trash.
Everything’s been infected by the days, weeks, years of living in the world. You’re born, you live, and you create memory. And memory informs everything, pulls the entire world into your brain. You reassemble the world and process it and you create trash that can’t be extruded. It just kind of stays in your brain.
Language is functional but is it even good enough to describe what’s actually important? I don’t know if words can articulate the stop-starts, the connections that are lucid one moment and nonsensical the next. Language describes what’s outside, not what’s inside.
Maybe that’s not a failure of language. It’s hard for me to describe what I don’t understand. I can describe the edges of it, maybe, I can describe the outline, yet I don’t know what’s really going on in here.
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