Tuesday 09/10/2024
Today as usual was the writers meeting. The cue was “memory”. About 9am I had an idea of what to do with it, and in an hour wrote a nice little piece, which I wall append.
Then it was time to go down and set up the auditorium for the Folk Festival rehearsal. This was not a full rehearsal, but just the songs where residents were actually to perform. I am in two of those. I got through the first one, “City of New Orleans” without screwing anything up. On “You’ve Got a Friend” with Mary, I missed my entrance on the third verse. We did it over and it was ok.
Later I went out and bought more sugar for the hummingbirds. My single feeder need to be filled three times a day, often has all five ports occupied.
At 4 I turned on the 11th floor TV. Anybody could do that, but several different people had asked me over the last couple of days if “the tv will be on for the debate”. Like it took my special magic to turn it on. Anyway, not wanting to watch the debate in a crowd, I ordered my supper for take-out and ate in my room. DIsappointed: Trump didn’t implode, Kamala didn’t hit any home runs. Whatever.
Here’s the thing I wrote for the group.
Memory support
What did old people do before we had internet-connected computers in our pockets? (Which in fact would be 2008 and later.) Or at least, on our desks? (i.e. 1995). Before then what we did is suffer. We stumbled and stammered and sputtered; snapped our fingers and said “You know! That… thing. That you… Oh, you know what I mean.”
The brain is a marvelous and mysterious thing, all the more mysterious for its failures. I have a large vocabulary — or did — multiple tens of thousands of words, all neatly filed and linked in a multi-dimensional semantic network. Of late, the fishnet has developed holes, where threads that once were knotted to words are dangling loose.
The annoying thing is, when you are swinging along from node to node, producing an effortless stream of amusing conversation and you come up to a gap, you know what word you want; you just can’t access the word itself. You know all about the word; you have a sensory memory and descriptive connections, but each of theses strands of your semantic net dangle loose, where they used to be tied to a noun.
“In our guest room we had a nice… shit.” Piece of furniture. Against the wall. Used it as a couch. Had a handmade crocheted throw on it most of the time? Cushions were brown, you folded it out to make a guest bed. All those strings are there, but the word has gone AWOL. Until a person, or your web browser, produces it, and then, of course! FUTON.
Yesterday at lunch we were talking about the last time any of us had attended A.C.T. in San Francisco. I had a clear memory of the last play I saw there. Not its title, of course! I can see the stage from our upper loge seats at the Geary Theater. I can remember the play had something to do with an imaginary horse, and a boy, and the name “Peter” is associated with it.
I got out my phone and keyed “play horse boy peter” into the address bar of the browser. And immediately got a link to the Wikipedia entry for Peter Shaffer’s play Equus.
Thank you, my pocket supercomputer, for re-weaving another tatter in my semantic web.
Codgerville 