where the fuck are my keys
Maybe ten years ago I bought this car for this job and I paid too much money for it - well, actually I took out a loan. I never needed a car until I had to drive all the time for work. Then the job and I broke up and once again I didn’t need a car. But I still needed to pay for it. And for the motherfucking parking tickets.
One time I went to the car after a few days and found three different violation stickers stuck on it because my license plate had expired. Two of those three were issued on the same day, which means one of those traffic cops is an extra special douchebag even for a traffic cop. That pissed me off even more than usual because I bought the stickers for the plates online but they hadn’t arrived yet.
I contested the tickets by mail. Two of them came back waived, but I still had to pay one of them. The one I had to pay was the one on the morning when I got two tickets - how could I have both committed and not committed a violation on the same day without moving my car? It was too much of a pain to contest that in person in court so I paid it. By that point I was either collecting unemployment or working at a new and terrible and low paying job or else I was collecting unemployment. Either way I was broke and really tense about it so paying those tickets on top of the car payment… well, small indignities burn a long time.
I dealt with all of this by pushing the car into a lake. In my mind. Not on purpose and not permanently, but regularly and on accident I would forget the car. I would draw a total mental blank about where I put it. The first couple times this happened I wondered maybe it had been towed or stolen. I was hesitant to admit it was my memory - my mind, me - that had gone wrong. I’d plan to drive somewhere for the first time in a few days, and when I walked outside my apartment I would have no idea at all where my car was. Or I would drive somewhere, feed the meter, go to the bar or rock show or friend’s house or library and it would be time to feed the meter again or time to go home and once again I have no car as far as my memory is concerned. (That’s why it took so long to get back to my wife at that one rock show.) It got so bad that I started leaving myself voicemails telling myself where I parked the car, which was embarrassing for multiple reasons.
As long as I’m writing, my memory occasionally plays another kind of trick - preja vu. This is where something will happen and I will get a strong sense of deja vu and I will have a memory of what happens next if I do something. Like, let’s say I’m eating lunch with a friend who tells me about a book she has read. I get the deja vu feeling. I imagine myself saying “I don’t really like books like that, generally, but I should try that one out, it sounds interesting.” From there, in my mind, I see a scenario play out where that friend and I get into an argument, or where the friend says “that makes sense, what kind of books do you generally like?” or something else, it doesn’t matter. As I see it unfold this whole scenario feels like a memory, like it’s already happened even though I know it hasn’t happened yet. It always feels like “I had a dream about this” because it has the feeling and look - slightly blurry around the edges, with some details magnified - of a memory from a dream. This always involves a choice on my part and one I always make the same way: if I say or do what I ‘remember’ saying or doing from when I supposedly dreamed this, then that scenario I feel like I remember will start to actually come true. I never do that because the thought of that scenario playing out is always terrifying. Not because the scenario itself is terrifying but because the idea of knowing in advance what will happen and then having it happen is terrifying. It would mean we are puppets on strings. Even more than we really are.
Anyway, after we moved out of Chicago we still didn’t need the car but the mental block went away. I think this was because I didn’t know the new city yet - my mind was altering a picture like a Stalinist censor and whatever else there is to say about that, it takes a lot of work and I think I wasn’t able to pull it off yet in the new city. The car eventually died because the fuel pump quit working. The fuel pump was inside the gas tank on this kind of car and a mechanic quoted me $1200 to fix it. I didn’t have $1200 and the car was only worth $1500 by this point. I was going to borrow money to get it fixed and then sell it, on the assumption that I couldn’t sell it as a paperweight. My wife suggested I put it up on craigslist as is, for $500. A guy gave me $400 or $450 for it. That was annoying but it felt good to be done. No more parking tickets or insurance payments or maintenance costs and a few less reminders of that stupid job.
A week or two ago the same thing happened several times, on multiple different occasions - twice with my phone and once each with a stapler, my notebook, my keys, and my water bottle. With each item I set it down in my work area, did something else, then needed the item and was like “it’s gone! where could it be?!” Total mental blank. Luckily I work in a small space so I could find my stuff quickly. It’s a disconcerting experience though, for a moment it’s like someone punched a hole in the world, like the object was swallowed up by the universe and there’s just nothing there at all, or like the object never existed at all except in my mistaken memory, like I dreamed I had a stapler, in the world’s most boring hallucination ever. Apparently I hate all of those objects like I hated that car. (And really, I didn’t hate the car, I liked it a lot, it had better speakers than any car I had had before. I hated a lot about being broke and about my employers and feeling worried about money and the car was an easy symbol for all that. Whenever I dropped the car into a memory hole I temporarily hid some of that hatred and fear. I guess that stuff is still all over the place in my life.)
This memory gap thing makes me think about my grandmother, whose Alzheimers got really bad before she died. Once it was clear how sick she was I consoled myself that, while the idea that all the forgetting that she did was upsetting to the rest of us, she was relatively okay because she had forgotten so much that she was somehow okay. Like she didn’t know what was happening and didn’t remember what it was like to be able to remember things. But I think for a while she forgot stuff but remembered that she had forgotten stuff. That is, she knew there were holes in her mental maps, she could tell that something had been airbrushed out of the photos, and that awareness plus the lack of knowing what had been there in that gap before, I think that bothered her. That sucks.
Of course because I’m self-absorbed and terrible I immediately begin to wonder if maybe this forgetting thing and that preja vu thing are early onset of my grandma’s condition, and I worry that I’ll end up like my mom who tells me the same story multiple times regularly when we talk. Because it’s all about me. But maybe you knew that.
Sigh.
It occurs to me I should probably stop saying I’m terrible. I don’t really think I’m terrible, though while I don’t think it I do feel like I am on occasion. Saying it is probly the wrong direction from where I want to go. So, great, once again I’m fucking up. Way to suck, you terrible thing.
Ha.
Anyway, I … oh man I was gonna say something…. but… I…. Oh well. I should get off here anyway, I got stuff I gotta take care of. Now where the fuck did I put my to do list? I did write one. Right?