annanotbob's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Who knows where the time goes
One of my friends, let's call her Beryl, because I've always wanted a friend called Beryl, got involved in a local project where people were invited to bring their old diaries, to put together a history of the area. She's never hidden from me the fact that she was a hardcore drug user in her youth, but when she fetched her 1970s diaries from her mother's loft and actually read them, she was shocked rigid. In her memory, she'd put all the smack behind her when she went to university, but, actually she hadn't. There it was, in her own handwriting, her own words. Irrefutable. Certain key scenes had stayed in her memory, but the chronology had become jumbled up and other important stuff had vanished. Like the fact that she led a double life at Uni - students over here, junkies over there. Beryl was really freaked out that she'd managed to totally obliterate one of the defining features of her three years at University and so was I. It may be that she has a particularly bad memory and that all the rest of us have perfect recall, but what if we all do that? Beryl went on to a professional career, leaving all drugs well and truly behind her before I met her, and the stories she told her new friends were about the student life, not about catching the last train up to London to score before her finals, spinning her friends some yarn about a family crisis. She hadn't told those stories and they'd gradually sunk below her radar and into oblivion. Which is fine for all that kind of thing, but what else has been lost along the way? What have I lost, what am I not telling my CPN, that may be pretty crucial? Fuck knows - and as I never kept a diary till I came on here, I'm not likely to find out. Sometimes I feel as if my memory is just too full. There's no room for anything else and the more stuff I have to keep, the more other things fall out. I just cannot seem to remember new music, and by new I mean the last twenty years, with only a very few exceptions. Sara goes mad when I ask who's that playing - 'Fucking hell, Ma, that's The Stone Roses!' Or whoever - I can't keep any of it straight, nor can I remember who any of the film actors are. No face pops into view at the names Angelina Jolie or Sienna Miller. I know these people are out there, I know a hideous amount about their private lives, but I couldn't pick them out of a line-up. But in Friday's session I suddenly remembered that when I was living alone with Sammie, when she was about three or four, I was late twenties, before Sara, Sammie used to go to her Dad's at weekends and for a while there I completely lost the plot. Most of it has gone, but I can remember spending a lot of time inside a massive wardrobe, all scrunched up with musty clothes in my face. There's also a scene at the local mental hospital out-patients waiting room, where everyone else has a scary, rigid half-smile and glazed eyes (we're talking 1980/81). I see a psychiatrist for less than fifteen minutes. He gives me a prescription and tells me to make another appointment. I ask the receptionist if I will have a longer meeting with him next time, but she tells me, no, future appointments are only five minutes as they're just to monitor the drugs. I look at the prescription. Lithium. It's like a switch being flicked in my mind. These people cannot help me, I'm on my own. I did indeed pull myself together (that is such an apt description - when I lose it these days it feels like becoming unravelled), and it lasted for quite a long time, relatively speaking. So I don't know what to make of all this, is all. I was pretty freaked out by this memory, and the intensity of the whole history-taking session, but it has lead to lots of quite useful displacement activity. I've cut out lots of tiny pictures for the decoupage - the open house art trail catalogue, 50 illustrated pages, kept me occupied all afternoon, but I haven't got any PVA glue left, so I'm not sticking anything down yet. I also managed to go through the box of CDs, taking out the ones I might want to play. Loads of them are Ren's and Sam's (hip-hop, Oasis, Manics and classical respectively), loads of them are empty boxes (Johnny Cash, American IV - such a wind-up) but we do have five copies of Blood on the Tracks, two shop ones and three home-made. Where the fuck did they all come from? Grateful for: 1. A sharp pair of scissors | 10:44 p.m. - 01/06/2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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