We were stood there, drinking our goon and talking to one another as and/or was or will be the occasion on any friday saturday sunday night of the week. The way everyone just wantonly was interacting, absolutely appalling. People and places infringe on our memory, forcing themselves into our head like they have a right to be there; they change us and I say that I will take my brain back, no longer leave nothing to chance about the sort of unspeakably shady character I might become all because one day I met so-and-so in such-and-such a place. Just a fifteen second encounter it was but that's all it takes these days and then they're IN. I am a virus too, infecting everyone I meet with a tiny part of myself that they're doomed to carry around forever.
Patterns and codes shift; I am paralyzed by fear. Paralyzed by my own treasonous psyche. Words don't fail; you do. Sentences change as I read them, trapping me in labyrinthine paragraph that I slowly, and with great terror, realize is my own biography. Choose Your Own Adventure: all the pages ripped out. We can cut out fear with a scalpel, delete it with a drug. Everything's getting got will get to me. In a dream I pull worms out of a hole in my foot as we're stood there, drinking our white wine and muttering to ourselves as is was will be the occasion every night day dream. The way everyone was melting and dissolving, disgusting. People and places infect us, sticking to the bottom of my shoe like they have a right to be there.
Maybe I'm just cold and I've had too much coffee. I can feel my guts, dead weight in my belly, I can feel them squirming and writhing. I think they want to get out. All life support systems fail. My brain drips out my ears and slithers off to parts unknown. I say I will take it back. Codes and scenery shift; I am paralyzed by my total lack of internal organs. Memories fade and recapitulate, trapping me in a labyrinthine mind which I slowly, and with great terror, realize is my own.
Sunday 28 April 2013
Thursday 18 April 2013
Journal
When I was sixteen and very angry I opened a file on my computer and called it 'Journal', because that's what a friend had told me to do. Then I began to fill it with predictably angst-filled ramblings in entries which I dated to the second of their conception, because there was a function in Word which allowed me to do that automatically, and I thought it was cool. Over the course of the next year or so, the day-to-day details of my uneventful life were transcribed in a ritualistic fashion, interspersed with various personal reflections. I became a little more self-aware, a little better at writing, a little less angry. The contents of this journal were interesting only insofar as they represented a viewpoint; the events recorded were common to everyone aged sixteen.
After a while, I changed the name of the file to 'Hamish', because that was my name. I did this because I realized I was growing up, fast, and when the file at the end of every entry asked me if I wanted to save the changes made to 'Hamish' I felt like I was in somehow in control of this process - I could simply say 'no', and the day would be erased. Soon I'd forget about it myself, and it would be as if that it had had never happened at all. I set my memories in stone - but only some of them. Only the parts that I could put into words. By placing my in control of the past, I figured to place myself in control of the future, and the person that I would become.
A year passes this way and as I shape the journal, it shapes me.
One day I came home from school and found that the entry for that day had already been written. It was dated to the very second that I had opened the file, and described my day exactly the same way that I would have, omitting or emphasizing the same trivial incidents at school, trying to express my angst and boredom in the same tepid language.
Nothing else happened for months, and I refrained from mentioning this event to anyone else, or in the journal itself. To write it down would have been to confirm the reality of the incident with much more confidence than I could muster - and crazy people are always certain of their delusions. I gave myself the benefit of the doubt. A lapse of memory, is what had happened. I'd simply forgotten the act of writing the entry. When it happened again, however, I all but broke down. It was the same as before; the day's entry was already written when I opened the file, and had ostensibly been written by me. The gross impossibility of such a thing was almost offensive. And it kept happening; every few months, the day would be written automatically.
I had my brain investigated. MRI scans, hypnotherapy, drug-assisted psychonautics and endless counselling sessions could find nothing to explain what I assumed, and hoped, to be episodic memory loss. This was a process that took some time, and while I was bouncing from clinic to clinic, acid-dealer to meditation retreat, the rate of entries that appeared in my journal increased until every second or third day was written for me. More symptoms developed: when I looked at mirrors, my reflection would sometimes act before I did, reaching for a toothbrush a fraction of a second early or taking off the sunglasses I was trying on before it occurred to me that they looked bad. These incidents always caused me to jump back in fright, my reflection now in time, and then examine the mirror, and myself, closely.
Then journal started to deviate and I began to go insane proper. Minor events would be recorded that had not occurred; I would remember them anyway. My mind split into two parallel streams. One contained what I actually did during the day. Then, I would read that day's entry - I didn't have to write anything at all by now - and then my second memory would be brought up to speed. I cried over a movie that I'd never watched and that may not have even existed. I felt simultaneously hungry and full, because I remembered both skipping lunch and eating it. Minor events became major ones; in the journal I began an intense relationship with a girl who I'd been introduced to at a party - a girl I'd never met and at party I didn't attend.
For, I suspect, the purposes of convenient storage, my brain treats the times when the journal and my actual life match each other as a single memory. These respites have become increasingly rare, however, and also bring into question what now constitutes my 'actual life'; the convergence of the two memories blurs my ability to tell them apart. It is hard to tell whether I have actually written this, or if I just remember writing it. Soon, I will be able to do nothing but read my journal and try to keep time with mirrors; one of me will cease to exist.
A year passes this way and as I shape the journal, it shapes me.
One day I came home from school and found that the entry for that day had already been written. It was dated to the very second that I had opened the file, and described my day exactly the same way that I would have, omitting or emphasizing the same trivial incidents at school, trying to express my angst and boredom in the same tepid language.
Nothing else happened for months, and I refrained from mentioning this event to anyone else, or in the journal itself. To write it down would have been to confirm the reality of the incident with much more confidence than I could muster - and crazy people are always certain of their delusions. I gave myself the benefit of the doubt. A lapse of memory, is what had happened. I'd simply forgotten the act of writing the entry. When it happened again, however, I all but broke down. It was the same as before; the day's entry was already written when I opened the file, and had ostensibly been written by me. The gross impossibility of such a thing was almost offensive. And it kept happening; every few months, the day would be written automatically.
I had my brain investigated. MRI scans, hypnotherapy, drug-assisted psychonautics and endless counselling sessions could find nothing to explain what I assumed, and hoped, to be episodic memory loss. This was a process that took some time, and while I was bouncing from clinic to clinic, acid-dealer to meditation retreat, the rate of entries that appeared in my journal increased until every second or third day was written for me. More symptoms developed: when I looked at mirrors, my reflection would sometimes act before I did, reaching for a toothbrush a fraction of a second early or taking off the sunglasses I was trying on before it occurred to me that they looked bad. These incidents always caused me to jump back in fright, my reflection now in time, and then examine the mirror, and myself, closely.
Then journal started to deviate and I began to go insane proper. Minor events would be recorded that had not occurred; I would remember them anyway. My mind split into two parallel streams. One contained what I actually did during the day. Then, I would read that day's entry - I didn't have to write anything at all by now - and then my second memory would be brought up to speed. I cried over a movie that I'd never watched and that may not have even existed. I felt simultaneously hungry and full, because I remembered both skipping lunch and eating it. Minor events became major ones; in the journal I began an intense relationship with a girl who I'd been introduced to at a party - a girl I'd never met and at party I didn't attend.
For, I suspect, the purposes of convenient storage, my brain treats the times when the journal and my actual life match each other as a single memory. These respites have become increasingly rare, however, and also bring into question what now constitutes my 'actual life'; the convergence of the two memories blurs my ability to tell them apart. It is hard to tell whether I have actually written this, or if I just remember writing it. Soon, I will be able to do nothing but read my journal and try to keep time with mirrors; one of me will cease to exist.
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