the freeway slowdance

that's me, circa 1987. my little cousin pattie (Patrick: "Nobody has a cousin named Pattie.") found it in a box. odd what people find digging through their old shit. i'm currently in the process of packing: for my up and coming roadtrip, for my new digs. i don't remember the trip the photo came from. hell, i just barely remember my trip to China only 9 months ago, little fleeting moments in the overall scheme of a trip, like when you can't remember the lyrics to the song only the chorus and a couple lines of each verse. the guy checking how deep the mud puddle was and falling in up to his waist. that space shuttle thing overlooking the shanties in the rice fields. wtc blowing up. some other stuff.

rewind. europe, 1998. the model outside the fountain at the Place de la Concorde. Cruisin' USA on the german kid's N64. a mcFlurry in luxembourg. rewind. canada, 1996. lake louise, a big f*cking glacier, and a remarkably comfortable chair in a hotel lobby. a bus. rewind again. to what? what happened before? i'm not sure, things start to get fuzzy. cancun and hang-gliding? the point being: do people remember a trip in it's entirety? anything in it's entirety? what happened on what day and why was it significant? for every little nothing that you remember how many hundreds more go undocumented, and forgotten. might as well never have happened.

i've got a memory like a sieve. laugh and forget and cry and forget. live and forget.. i don't really look through photo albums, re-read entries. people outside my window wheeling shopping carts full of junk to their cars. like 2 years ago in reverse, somebody holds a mirror up to time and says "look." retain, dammit. retain.