As I explained at great length in a long and unexpected email to a friend last week, it takes me a long time to understand things. The importance of connections made years ago and how those connections light up today, sometimes I just don’t get it. The same is true of the way things work. I may be pure zeitgeist, never understanding or attempting to understand the mechanics of daily life. So many words I know of but can not define, words that huddle in my mind waiting to be used but which would appear out of order, out of meaning, as I wantonly plug them in to sentences and paragraphs, or blast together whole stories using only those words.

I re-read a bunch of John Ashbery poetry yesterday and today, remembering the ease with which he summons and then herds incongruities into a new reality. Pancakes talking to horses ridden by bottles of scotch, oh my!

I have been writing a lot of things lately. Most of it self-serving gnashing at my mental cud but once in a while a distinct and meaningful memory surfaces. So much of college I thought was forgotten can in fact rise up from the flab of memory. They say that muscle has memory, but does not memory have muscle, too?

I arrived at the notion of forgetfulness as an expression of hate. I may not understand hate, though. I have hated nothing since my 5th Grade teacher, and even that was a contrived attempt at being like certain other kids. Hate is a poison, usually expressed in diluted ways. Peeves are, I think, our most pathetic form of hate. Grammar peeves, in particular, are among the feeblest attempts at expressing intellectual superiority and Judge Judy-like hatefulness.

But all out removal of someone from memory seems like hate. If I think of certain events and times in college, for instance, I will remove from the narrative references to situations which made me a fool. If someone else tells a story involving a person who destroyed me I will skip that person’s name as if it was never uttered. I will not ignore it or pretend I didn’t hear it. It will genuinely not arrive in my mind.

That long and unexpected e-mail was to the sister of Keri, who died 12 years ago this month. I am poor at keeping track of anniversaries, and do not commit the memory of such things to computers or PDAs.

….

I have to stop talking about this because I am in a public place and it is making me weepy to think about that again. Public weeping is not allowed.

….

I dreamed about eating a Big Mac, and the Big Mac tasted like dirt. Biting into it caused it to disintegrate, and earthworms and those tiny German cockroaches rushed from the collapsing tower of Frankenfood concoction. I have not eaten fast food from a chain restaurant since 1995, with the exception of a burger at Hardee’s in 2002. I thought Hardee’s was more like an Applebee’s or some place that could reasonably be considered a notch or two above McDonald’s or Burger King. I was wrong and man that was a nasty burger.

Of course I poison myself in other ways, but my innards will not tolerate some things and, as my dream indicated, a Big Mac is one of them.

What am I talking about?