This blog (mostly) provides pretty good accounting of life events going back at least to 2005 when I started it and to many times prior with the many FLASHBACK posts. My MS Money records go back to 2001.
I'm finding I need these archives more and more as I get older since, like the Dali painting here, I feel my memory becoming more and more "melty."
Here's an example that just came up this morning.
I was watching a video of some YouTuber going on an airplane trip and seeing them all masked and shit for the multi-hour flight made me sad since I doubt I'd want to undergo that so I guess I won't be travelling by air any time soon, especially as this shit we're going through seems like it should have some surrealist artist paint a depiction of it titled "The Persistence of a Pandemic." But I digress... The thought of air travel made me think back to my own experiences in the past and I thought back to another scary time we all lived through when I had flown across country on a business trip to Arizona only a month after 9/11.
"But wait a minute!" my brain screamed out, "How could that trip have been in October of 2001 when I clearly remember going out with a company HR rep there and feeling guilty since I was drinking and driving not even a month after getting my DUI in December of 2001?"
Thus initiated a slight mind fuck since, for years, whenever I thought of the trips I've taken, I'd always thought I'd only been to Arizona one time (other than walking across the Hoover Dam technically into AZ when I went there during a Vegas trip in '16).
So I sat quietly and pieced shit together. I clearly remembered it was October 2001. I clearly remembered it was to train the management staff on my management training program. I clearly remembered the dude who said he was soon leaving the company to live on the beach in Mexico and be a shrimper (a stupid goal my Johnny Corporate Tool Self thought back then). I clearly remember going to the Mexican place with the HR rep. I remember worrying about driving a company rented car, buzzed, with no legal license since I was using an old duplicate I'd kept in a drawer since the real one was confiscated during my DUI stop. ...In December. A month ago? But it was October?
Then the real memories were starting to sort out...
But I had to confirm them since I felt like I was in some Mandala Effect or some such shit.
Yup, I had posted about the October trip...AND the January trip. Somehow I had forgotten I'd gone there twice.
More confirmation. Here are two separate entries for a cash withdrawal and a debit card use in Arizona, in October 2001 and January 2002.
Once I sat and concentrated on it a bit more, I started to remember a few more details...
The October trip, unlike what I report in the above linked FLASHBACK post, wasn't to introduce the management training program I designed. I hadn't finished that yet. It was to train the trainer that had just been promoted there on how to train new hires. With her shadowing me, I conducted an entire week's training class and afternoon refreshers with the reps there, just like I did each week back home in Florida. That's why this trip was a full week including ample time on the weekend after the workdays to visit the Grand Canyon. I spend just a few days later in January training the management team.
It was in January that I went out with the HR rep, not October. The office had an overhaul and many of the floor sups were noobs, with one of them soon opting out planning on living the life Bohemian in ol' Mexico. That's also why the corporate office HR rep, from Florida, was also in Mesa. She was training the new HR rep there.
Part of the confusion was I had, both times, stayed at the same hotel, went to the same office (although now with new management in January) with many of the same reps, and the same boring, bland and banal beige landscape of Mesa, Arizona.
Now that I acknowledge the two trips more accurately, I now remember even little details like how on the first trip my hotel view was facing south over the highway and the January view was north over the parking lot (and lower to if not on ground level). The weather in October was, of course, scorching hot but much milder if not even a tad chilly in January. I had a bigger, more comfortable rental car in October but I found the January car a little cramped.
I'm finding memories to be much more like this as I get older. Melty. Like in Dali's painting. Adds more credence to the argument of a nihilistic viewpoint. What's it all matter? If they're gonna melt into each other and blend to form a blatant falsehood, ostensibly as a precursor to eventually just oozing away entirely into the empty sands of a lonely, desolate desert, then who cares?