I can never remember which stripes are meant to be the slimming ones. Is it vertical or horizontal? I've been told that this is the stuff that matters, but I can never remember which ones are which. So I don't wear stripes. Not the vertical nor the the horizontal ones. Because I can't remember.
There is so much I don't do simply because I don't remember.
Down by the park there's a grocery store. They sell un-frozen grapes, homemade soup in a bag, raw chocolate, chips made of falafel, sago based desserts and all sorts of boutique-brand yoghurts. A whole heap of different brands of yoghurt. I like living my life in places where there's a good chance I'm not the most pretentious fool kicking around. So, yeah - there's some pretty wacky shit in that shop, but for me there's comfort in being surrounded by all that.
I'm in that store every Sunday morning. I say 'morning' but I mean 'whatever time I awake after spending Saturday night discussing waiters and cooks with photographers in books'. I stumble in there. Just me, my sunglasses and my Country Music that is louder than yours and roam the perfectly square space, all the while filling a blue basket with guilty pleasures of hope and distraction.
Every Sunday until 3 weeks ago.
That was the day that I noticed they'd hired a new girl behind the counter. She looked mighty familiar at first glance. She recognised me straight away. Even knew my name. Apparently she worked for me in London. Apparently I had fired hire. Apparently she harbored no ill will for that. And apparently, I had no memory of her name.
And now its too hard. I can't remember her name and she knows mine and I hate that position. I hate not remembering. I don't go to that grocery store anymore. I don't go because I don't remember.
I don't have plants because I don't remember to water 'em. I don't have cars because I don't remember how to drive 'em. I don't have socks because I don't remember where I left 'em. And I don't have kids because I don't remember to remain in the same country as 'em.
I met this artist in LA. Her Art mixes old hotel stationary, neon and irreverence. She's part Chinese, part Romanian, part Californian and part Canadian. This is a lot of parts. She had a sparsely furnished, one bedroom apartment up one of the canyons above Hollywood. It had polished pine floors, the whitest of whitewashed walls, un-stained wooden handles on the kitchen cabinets and embossed, beige light fixtures mounted around at forehead height. And not much else. We took mushrooms cooked into heart shaped chocolate, drank wine aged in huge clay pots and talked of our families in her cast iron bed.
When dawn broke through the blinds, we got up and hiked halfway up to the Hollywood Sign. I told her that I was in my last few months of The Road I was on. That I'd be back home before the middle of the year. She said - "Really? Only a few months?? Damn! I'm only gonna have you for a few months??".
I didn't remember offering her to have me. I didn't remember giving any indication that there was something to have. I didn't remember doing anything that would even make it seem like that was an option. So, I stopped seeing her. Because I didn't remember what I did or was doing that made her mistakenly think I could be had. I still don't remember.
These past few days I've started back up on this site. I've got a different direction and style I wanna take things. I might not get it to where I want it. I might not be able to maintain the consistent posting needed to get there. We'll see.
In the post above, I've told you about things I don't do because I don't remember. This here Blog is the opposite. It's something I actually proactively do - not stop doing - because I don't remember. Yeah, there's been short brackets when I've had varying motivations to write these vignettes down. There's been times it had a point. Weeks when several postings had a reason. But then there's a change of place and people and those ends don't exist anymore and I'm just a guy tapping away on a keyboard in a darkened, couchless room.
And I'm ok with that. It's fine. It's more than fine. It's comforting. It's comforting to be that guy, even if just for a few minutes. That guy doing something for reasons he doesn't remember. And I needed a new comfort, for I'm down one now that I've lost that damn grocery store over by the park.
