Couch Potato Head

“An interesting illustration of the uselessness of a brain in a body without movement is the sea squirt, which spends the first part of its life as an animal moving around, and the second part attaching itself to a rock and then camping out as a plant.  As soon as it settles down, does it use this time as an opportunity to meditate or think about the meaning of life?  No, it eats its brain for the energy.  This should make us very curious about what happens to a human brain in a body that spends too much time on the couch.”

– Todd Hargrove, A Guide to Better Movement

Stupidface

A month or two back, I introduced myself to a guy I see frequently at the gym – a big black dude in his early 50’s, who’s usually lifting about five times whatever I am.  We had already reached the head-nod stage of recognition, but had never actually talked.  And I’m very glad we finally did, as he turns out to be tremendously nice, and very funny.

He had recently been having should issues, and so a few weeks ago asked me for some mobilization and rehab exercises and advice.  Which led a mutual friend to point out the irony of one of the biggest guys in the gym getting advice from a guy who looked like the gym’s accountant.

Somehow, that evolved into a line of Steve Urkell jokes.  Which, in turn, led to me to saying that I preferred to be called Stefan (Steve’s suave French cousin, for those behind on their 90’s television).  And, from there, the nickname stuck; he’s been calling me Stefan ever since.

A few days ago, however, he came over to confirm my real name.  He had apparently seen me with Jess and my parents, and had wanted to say hello, but didn’t want to call me Stefan, given that they weren’t in on the joke.

And though I told him they wouldn’t have minded either way, apparently his caution stemmed from having once been burned in a similar situation.  A friend had jokingly started calling him “Big Head,” and, in return, he had nicknamed the guy “Stupid Face.”  So, inevitably, at one point he came across the friend, along with his friend’s children and elderly parents.

And, without even thinking, he waved hello and said, “what’s going on, Stupid Face?”

Apparently, not a big hit.

Forget Me Not

One sunny afternoon two or three summers back, I headed down to Battery Park City on a whim, to take the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty.  I had spent more than 15 years as a Manhattanite staring out at her, but had never gone out to see Lady Liberty up close.

Except, it turns out, I had.  As my mother informed me after I told her about the trip, she and my father had taken my brother and me when I was nine or ten. Sadly, that’s pretty much par for the course, as I’ve similarly forgotten a wide array of childhood adventures and experiences; enough so that my mother frequently suggests she should have just locked my brother and me in a closet for our first ten or fifteen years of life, and then told us that she had taken us to the places that they actually did, as it would have saved a lot of time and money but yielded the same result.

So when I mused a few years ago that I’d always wanted to eat at The French Laundry, and my mother informed me that I’d already been as a young teenager, I wasn’t surprised.  But I did feel torn between mourning that non-memory as a colossal waste, or celebrating it (even in conscious absentia) as perhaps one of the formative experiences that molded me into the snotty foodie/serious cook I am today.

More generally, I’ve been trying to take comfort in the idea that those forgotten memories are still somehow locked inside me.  Because, otherwise, all the time I’ve spent reading novels and non-fiction books, watching great films, taking classes, etc., has gone completely down the tubes, given that pretty much none of that content is still available for voluntary mental recall.

Recently, for example, I started re-reading 1984.  And though I for some reason remembered verbatim the lines, “The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see,” I had otherwise completely forgotten the entire novel, except that it had something to do with Big Brother and telescreens and the Thought Police.

Or, take Indiana Jones, about two minutes of which I caught in passing on a lounge-area television this past weekend. There, too, while I can visually picture certain iconic scenes, and remember a handful of pithy lines, I couldn’t even roughly outline the plot any longer, except that it had something to do with lost artifacts and being chased by Nazis.

In short, it appears I’ve lost the details of pretty much everything I watched or read prior to this decade.  Though I suppose it could be worse: my mother can read an entire book, and only when the twist ending seems oddly predictable, realize that she read the book previously, six months back.

Perhaps that’s what I’m trending towards myself, especially as I age.  But, on balance, I’m not sure I’d really mind. It must be nice to take something you already know you love, and then experience it again for the first time.