last night i took a walk to hawthorne and thought about why i like portland as much as or more than san francisco. there aren't any gardens in sf. the beautiful white rowhouses with bay windows and victorian trim are closed off, not just with locked doors but locked metal gates. no gardens. no people sitting in their kitchens that i can see from the street. and most of the people i meet wandering around are from somewhere else. the residents are so mysterious. the whole city is. portland has the appeal of being somewhere of possibility instead of fantasy. i actually live here. i really, really do. portland is a fantasy but at least i'm inside it.
an old friend visited today and we were happy to see him. he wrote me a note saying i was "adequate and glistening" which i thought was a good compliment.
today donna and i went to powell's and i got two calenders: carl larsson and maps of the ancient world. we also got some books by carlos castaneda, to see what his ideas are like. i made some cookies and ate too much cookie dough. i hung out with c. for a while but he's being drunk and annoying. he told me about the ship rising and falling and the 5 extinctions and it was kind of interesting but he's too drunk to have an real conversation.
i thought more people would care that i had a real near death experience. they seem to get extremely worried when i mention specific drug names, but not when i almost die. maybe people are just skimming? or disappointed that i didn't just die and get it over with. i'm not sure. in any case, i'm not going away...
it's strange that i almost died and i don't remember it at all. it seems unreal, not traumatic. the more i think about it and talk to c. the more i realize how little i remember of that hour. and it's funny how your personality changes when you are not remembering anything. i used to notice it with gabe, because he consistently blacks out when he drinks hard alcohol, and has no memory of what happens. after a while i was able to tell, and i would say "you're not going to remember this tomorrow" but he wouldn't believe me. he would tell me he loved me a million times "no really, i really love you!" that's how i could tell. i wanted to have philosophical conversations with him to see how he was different, i wanted to videotape him and show it to him in the morning.
i've only had memory loss twice, and i'm fascinated by how my personality changes. it happened on two different drugs so i know the changes have something to do with the fact that i won't remember what i'm doing. i become aggressive and bossy and i repeat myself. i was mean to chris and told him what happened was his fault, but since i was in the midst of memory loss i could not have remembered whose fault it actually was. i just made it up. i think that when someone is in that state they have no conception of past or future and so they have no reason to hold back their emotions or opinions. i should find out what part of the brain is affected. what if people were always less aware of the past, and possibley the future... we were talking about this the other night, about HM. His surgery made him unable to retain memory. his short term memory and long term memory were intact but he could not retain the short term memories.
donna saw some videos of him writing and apparently he always writes the same things, like 'i'm just now coming into consciousness'. abadger pointed out that he was faced with the same long term memories and the same situation every day, and he consistently came to the same conclusion... there was constant newness but nothing really changed in his interpretation.
"Well, what I keep thinking is that possibly I had an operation. And somehow the memory is gone... And I'm trying to figure it out... I think of it all the time. I don't remember this, and why I don't remember that." ... "every day is alone in itself; whatever enjoyment I've had and whatever sorrow I've had... Right now, I'm wondering 'Have I done or said anything amiss?' You see, at this moment everything looks clear to me, but what happened just before? ... That's what worries me. It's like waking from a dream; I just don't remember."