Hey there. Hello. It’s been awhile. Sit down in that wingback chair and let’s have a chat.
Where have I been for 2.5 years? I’ll tell you. Waffling about my career and playing roller derby and eating a lot, that’s where. No really, that’s it. There was also that big breakup, which actually turned out pretty stellar, now I have an old best friend and fairly regularly we eat steak and drink bourbon together and make fun of past & present assholes. And we still have our weird idioglossia that I’ll never let die! Love ya, Boss.
Also I was Head of Media Relations for derby for a year too, but effective today that is no more and I’m now the minion-y Media Writer, right where I belong. I saw the decline in my work performance on my annual report and thought about the horrors of squeezing in grad school starting in January and I ran away screaming. Right to this blog! I just haven’t had the headspace to write, and now I do; since now it’s my ongoing derby job aaaaaaaand it will be good exercise for the social theory papers I’m soon going to have to start pooping out. I stopped writing somewhere along the way and I’ve forgotten how to do it…but now I have nothing but things to say. Steep over, pour on.
I want to talk about trivia. You know what? I kind of hate trivia. I also hate crosswords. My boss copies the NYT crossword for me every Monday morning because I told her at the beginning of the year that I wanted a head start on Alzheimer’s. I finally threw away January-June last week. For the most part untouched. I couldn’t stand opening my planner and seeing them all lying around there with their judgmental blank squares. The ones I tried were so sad, I made a little tick next to things that sounded familiar but that I couldn’t remember. There were many ticks. Too many ticks. Things I knew I had encountered at some point but couldn’t get to up in the ole noggin. I had the imprints on my brain but no way to access them.
I played Trivial Pursuit on Friday and it was quite sad! Like a shade was drawn that I couldn't get behind. All I knew for sure was about goddamned timothy hay. Timothy hay! I had a pet rabbit once named Cinnamons (plural). However, I was also mildly obsessed with Joan of Arc a couple of years back. And one of the questions was “Who is the maid of Orléans?” I didn’t know. I didn’t fucking know! I should’ve known that. No, worse, I DID know that! Once upon a time I did! How did I not remember? If you can’t remember something, can you claim to have ever really then known it? How can you know and then not know? Can you unlearn things? Or are they just locked up somewhere? How do I get to them? Does it really matter?
Of course not! The whole point of trivia is that it’s trivial, right? Like these things are little drips of knowledge that are nice to have but not essential, things you come across and slide away in the archives. That’s all! And yet, not remembering scared the shit out of me. I guess it’s terrifying because my mind appears to be holding on to NOTHING. It’s not containing the trivia, but most times it’s not containing the big beefy things of substance either. I’m not filling it with The Kardashians, but then again, I have to really sit and think hard about what happened in The Blood Meridian, which I read just a few months ago and absolutely loved and dog-eared and found to be a brick in my moral mortar. People’s names and faces and stories from high school are slipping away. I couldn’t tell you about the national budget crisis if my life depended on it. I’ve read a lot about it, I’m interested and invested in it…but it’s just not up there. I don’t retain things I’ve learned. How come? Where does it all go? Is there some invisible brain toilet that it gets flushed down in favor of personal sphere current events? Is my brain just rotted? WAS IT ALL THE WILSON PHILLIPS? Look, I was 8, and I’m not sorry!
So if I’m not retaining the gristle and I’m not retaining the beef, then holy shit, what’s happening? Let’s see. The word 'trivia' was also used to describe a place where three roads met in ancient Rome. It’s Latin for "a place where three ways meet". Ha! (That was just Google. Shut up). So the mystery can be solved by nailing down what this third avenue is, right? I have some ideas. I think the other avenue is your head life, the thoughts that run parallel to reality, the stuff that is neither bigger nor smaller but exactly what’s at hand in your actuality, only idealized. Looking at what's happening in the moment as an outsider, experiencing things as an analytical spectator when you shouldn't be: because you're there in it and you should be living it. By the balls. You’re not working out how to fix the CTA or even processing that little blurb about chicken hormones on the Chipotle bag from lunch, you’re combing through the FACTS OF YOUR OWN EXISTENCE. Or at least I am. I spend a lot of time on that avenue. Probably too much. Too much energy spent on head life replaying, a loop over the very same loop. It becomes the Ouroboros, really. Where the roads meet. Because all you’ve done is arrive at the trivia! And then there’s just no juice left for the big or the small. Or is that the trivia itself? Is it all just trivia?! UNIVERSE!!!
Quickly though, I wanna mention that I think the problem of memory and knowledge is two-fold. I have made a habit of turning my life over and over again. Like the figs from The Bell Jar. I spend so much time admiring the figs and trying to decide on a fig that the figs all begin to go bad and drop wasted from the tree. Meanwhile, whatever fig I’ve actually had the presence of mind to seize eventually gets discarded. By my own hand. All of my big figs have ended up just thrown to the ground. I kind of consume the shit out of my interests and crushes and choices and play them on repeat, overlaying them onto reality and then one day I wake up, and fuck fish, I’m done with fish!
Recently I watched the new Clash of the Titans with Dame and Karma, guess how much I’ve retained? All I can really recall is people riding around on giant scorpions. And Raph Fiennes' hilariously douche-bagged turn as Hades. Quiz me in a few weeks to see if that fish makes it or not. It’s gonna have to swim upstream.
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