Announcement

I have decided to leave Blogger. I don't like the format or the style, and I like Tumblr better.

Earlier this year I created a Formspring because I needed impetus for my writing, and people could ask me stupid or interesting prompts, and it was fun.

But Formspring basically sucks, so I'm consolidating. Head over to my new blog if you want. Or don't.

I'll be leaving this page up for posterity and I'll link to it in my new shit, but don't expect any more posts.

Bye...

Catheters and Darkness

It's a strange thing to black out. For one, you have a bunch of people coming up to you and telling you about all the things you did, and you can't remember any of them. It's like you've missed out on part of the relationship, and now you're not on the same page as everyone else.

I can think of two similar situations:

1. Someone travels backwards in time, but only in their head. So for instance, Gordon the six year old goes up to his parents and says, "Hi guys. I've just graduated from high school and you're going to need to send me to college or something now. Sorry for robbing you of ten+ years watching your son grow up, by the way. Also, can I have an iPhone?" Or, freshman Gordon walks up to the people who are now my dedicated friends, only back then they didn't know me, and says "Hey guys, so how about that ski trip last winter? Was that crazy or what?" You have no frame of reference.

2. You write a letter to someone, but never give it to them. My girlfriend does this sometimes - she says she does it when she needs to vent, but then sometimes she'll get frustrated and say, "Didn't I already tell you all this?" only to realize that I wasn't privy to that conversation.

...Enter tangent.
It's occurred to me that you never really know anyone. I don't know my parents or friends or anybody, and neither do you. It's like there's a Facebook in your head, and you have profile pages for everyone you've ever met. If you interact with them regularly, you update it more and the profile page becomes nearly identical to their actual personality. If you lose touch, the profile falls into disrepair, and you're surprised when you see them fifteen years later and their face doesn't match their profile picture. If you have a heart-to-heart, their bio expands and expands until it nearly resembles their actual personality, but the fact remains - you don't know anyone. Just like the words we hear are approximations of ideas that we then reverse engineer into similar ideas, the interactions we have with people we know allow us to approximate them more accurately in our heads. So when you have a sex dream about somebody, it's a little awkward to be around them the next day - but only from your end. And if you write a letter to someone but never deliver it, that's a conversation you had with the profile in your head but never with the actual person.
That's what blacking out is like, but even more so because it actually happened. So a bunch of people now have a relationship with me that I don't have with them. Say there's someone I only know by acquaintance, but we have a heart-to-heart on the night in question. The next day, I'm one of their closest friends but they're still only an acquaintance. Or take a good friend, someone that I care about, but when I'm deep in the throes of inebriation I say something that maybe shouldn't ever be said out loud, and now they're still my pal but I'm only the guy that used to be their friend.

Another reason why blacking out is weird is that I can't remember when it began. There's a movie that came out a few years ago, a mediocre rom-com with Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz called What Happens In Vegas. Anyway there's a sequence when they're all getting progressively intoxicated, and everything starts spinning, and the scenes start cutting faster and faster and blending together and everything's kind of loud and a little blurry and it just spins and spins into nothingness. That's actually a very accurate scene - watch it, and you will understand how I remember Sunday night. It's the most frustrating thing; I can't remember when I started being unable to remember. I can't even remember a proper chronology of back when I could remember.

All I remember is sometimes my clothes were on and sometimes they were off and I was running through a house and sometimes I was playing piano and there were a lot of other people and then I was waking up in a hospital and it hurt to pee.