When I have a senior moment, I go back my youth. When everything was fresh and new. Memories of being here before now. Forgetting names and faces is one thing but not remembering what day or even what year you're in is a whole different ball of confusion. Forgetting painful memories is something we all do with time, burying them deep to move forward. Maybe it's all I can do to remember to forget. I wear my age like a badge of honor.
There's no embarrassment in growing old. It always comes back as a memory to bite your saggy wrinkled ass. The indignities of slowly falling apart. Flashes of past events buried down inside your brains. Hidden in a dark place to rise like the sun every dawn. Losing your memory is a scary process that at some point maybe even you cannot remember who you are. Or did you just think it up out of the blue? Perhaps the idea of you whom you believe to be is imaginary. Where you thinking out loud while talking to yourself? The idea that we retain every shred of information from the past is wishful thinking.
Recalling milestones and special events that may hold meaning to you but nothing to somebody else. What happened to who, what, when, where, or why. The basic W's of good reportage in reminiscence. At the central core of recollections gathered internally from outside stimulus. The file cabinet of brainy ideas. Thoughts don't occur alphabetically or by numbers. Chaos is the order that rules every moment. Random patterns click impulses without reason or sense of being.
I admit my memory isn't as good as it used to be. I live inside my own head. My brain sponge absorbs everything that surrounds my head including the concept of having a brain. All I hear are my own thoughts gnawing away like mice inside the walls of my skull. I only hear the sound of my own voice when speaking out. The fact that I don't listen is because I'm half deaf from a lifetime of screaming noise inside and out of my ear drums pounding. Everything else I hear outside of my ears is a concept manufactured first inside my head and then inside yours too. There would be no me if you didn't exist outside and somewhere in my head. We need each other to acknowledge us in symbiotic relational rhythms.
Alive in some semblance of a real world, someplace turned inside out. Where I dwell to make it up as I go along. Everything that happens comes from me and mine. Every thought solicits a reaction by me, then you happen to pop up in my head. I just conjured you up not knowing a single thing about it. The world at large is only a thought away. It's real as you might imagine it's real. Just an eye blink and affirmative nod to verify your presence and my being there in the same moment. To justify your existence through my identity. I dreamed you up in my fevered brow. I concocted this mess to prove I am here now.
You aren’t really here unless I think you into this magic moment. A location yet unknown but predetermined. The one-way, dead-end destiny of our collaborative creation. A figment of our mutual making. Only in my head could you possibly exist and vice versa. Every single one of you. At every place at once on every planet in the universe. There are places that accumulate space inside the vast emptiness amid the void of our universal heads. Where it all began. In the beginning there was a thought, pure and simple. A basic idea happening in this speck of time.
If you think so, will you believe it? It could be whatever your dreams wish. You will it into a place to believe it’s real. Every desire giving birth to creations from a single thought of many thinkers. This thought that you're thinking, now at this gap in space. We’re sharing each other into a place of wishful fulfillment. Some semantic semblance of the super real. Your experience originated from my thoughts’ original thinking of you. A figment of my twisted imagination. I resemble that thought. You think, therefore we’re doing a solo dance. A thought process jumping along the electro static brain waves, washing away the sand and stone of thought's timeless erosion.
There’s no escaping reality: run away; see how far you may get. The mind is a terrible thing to waste. The personification of modern day insanity. No better drug than the sweet revenge of living well. The madhouses overflow. Normalcy bursts at the seams, busting a gut with technological torture and spilling the beans of reason for being dead while buried alive. The shock trauma of everyday life and the poor treatment received as outcasts in society’s brittle construct. When I snap my finger, you will remember everything. When I clap my hands, the light in your head will blink on.
The insecurity of experience persecuted into a snake pit of irrational being. Boxed in and pigeonholed. No flag will reveal the light of a new day. The therapy of repetition. Repeat life freely and forgive mistakes in the lint traps web of deceit. Above the dust yet under the weather. Insanity’s threat is the national debt of alienation against nature. No rage is too great. No one will play the game if they know it’s rigged. The carnival is always arriving in town after dark. Maybe it never left. What stale hell is this? Boredom and the tedious smiles of others forced happiness. When all around you seems like madness, it surely is. Look around and take a deep breath. Inhale. Remain still, exhale. Repeat. Once again smile, close your eyes and remember if you still can.