Now I Remember

Item: Twenty-seven boxes of Valentines candy, cost $298. Item: Fourteen talking ro-
botic birds, cost $112.
As April 15 gets closer and closer, my tax preparer, Mary, keeps calling, asking,
“What isthis all about?”
Item: Two nights at the Carson Hilton in Carson, California, February 21, 2001.
Mary asks, why was I in Carson? The twenty-first is my birthday. What about this
trip makes it a business deduction?

The Valentines candy, the talking birds, the nights in the Carson Hilton, they make me so glad I keep receipts. Otherwise, I’d have no idea. A year later, I have no memory about what these items represent
That’s why, the moment I saw Guy Pearce inMemento, I knew finally someone
was telling my story. Here was a movie about the predominant art form of our time:
Note taking.

All my friends with Palm Pilots and cell phones, they’re always calling them- selves and leaving reminders to themselves about what’s about to happen. We leave Post-It notes for ourselves. We go to that shop in the mall, the one where they en- grave whatever shit you want on a silver-plated box or a fountain pen, and we get a reminder for every special event that life goes by too fast for us to remember. We buy those picture frames where you record your message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there’s those digital cameras so we can all e-mail around our photos—this century’s equivalent of the boring vacation slide show. We organize and reorganize. We record and archive.

I’m not surprised that people likeM emento, I’m surprised it didn’t win every Academy Award and then destroy the entire consumer market for recordable compact discs, blank-page books, Dictaphones, DayTimers, and every other prop we use to keep track of our lives.

My filing system is my fetish. Before I left the Freightliner Corporation, I bought a wall of black steel, four-drawer filing cabinets at the office-surplus price of five bucks each. Now, when the receipts pile up, the letters and contracts and what- not, I close the binds and put on a compact disc of rain sounds, and file, file, file. I use hanging file folders and special color-coded plastic file labels. I am Guy Pearce without the low body fat and good looks. I’m organizing by date and nature of ex- pense. I’m organizing story ideas and odd facts.

This summer, a woman in Palouse, Washington told me how rapeseed can be grown as a food or a lubricant. There are two different varieties of the seed. Unfortu- nately, the lubricant type is poisonous. Because of this, every county in the nation must choose whether it will allow farmers to grow either the food or the lubricant variety of rapeseed. A few of the wrong type seeds in a county, and people could die.

She also told me how the people bankrolling the seeming-grassroots movement to tear down dams are really the American coal industry—not environmentalist fish huggers and white-water rafters, but coal miners who resent hydro-electric power. She knows because she designs their websites.
Like the robotic birds, these are interesting facts, but what can I do with them?

I can file them. Someday, there will come a use for them. The way my father and grandfather lugged home lumber and wrecked cars, anything free or cheap with a potential future use, I now scribble down facts and figures and file them away for a future project.
Picture Andy Warhol’s townhouse, crowded and stacked with kitsch, cookie
jars, and old magazines, and that’s my mind. The files are an annex to my head.

Books are another annex. The books I write are my overflow retention system for stories I can no longer keep in my recent memory. The books I read are to gather facts for more stories. Right now, I’m looking at a copy ofPhaedrus, a fictional con- versation between Socrates and a young Athenian named Phaedrus