Posted on February 8th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Memory, Old Posts.
(Answering "What is the best time you've ever had at a fireworks show?")
Eighteen years old, with my first girlfriend, sitting on a bluff on Capital Hill in Seattle overlooking Lake Washington. It was three days after we'd kissed for the first time, and eight days before she took my virginity; we were at some very nice place in between for most of the night. Some hours after the fireworks we dropped acid and waited for sunrise. In the very early slow light before dawn, holding each other in absolute infatuated blissful stillness and silence, an owl swept down into the valley beneath us, passing not two feet over our heads. Just remembering that moment makes goosebumps rise on my arms.
Posted on September 27th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Boring Posts, Recovery, Memory.
(I'm going to post insignificant details of my rebuilding mind, both because I wish I'd kept closer track of my pre-stroke mind -- even before my stroke, my memory was not good, but now it's awful -- and because I'm living here, and while my friends keep marveling at my speed of recovery, it frequently seems like I'm standing still to me.)
For four or five months, I've been typing every day, and my progress has been infinitesimal. Not the progress of my content; two months ago I couldn't summon up the word "infinitesimal", for instance. But my typing is about the same as two months ago. It's frustrating. A sentence will enter my thoughts, and by the time the typing catches up, sometimes the sentence will have vanished. And, my god, the N's. For some reason, N is particularly difficult, both the placement of the N in a word -- literally about one-third of the time my mind will drop the N, except the ING combination -- and also the placement of the N on the keyboard. Even though, as I said, I stare at the keyboard every day.
Composing and typing time: 24 minutes.