The Junk Drawer

So yes. My new phone  has ingested several thousand of my sister's old contacts and a dainty portion of my own, and I am straightening out the mess by hand. It's coming along well; I'm nearly done with the back forty and should be finishing up 'long about month's end when the stagecoach comes through.

I am making a point to delete all the contacts I don't recognize. Then I add in the ones that aren't in there that should be in there.

I know what you're thinking. There's no point in deleting, Boomer. It doesn't matter how many people you have in your contact list. You don't have to memorize them anymore. The idea that you need to slim down your contact list is a sign that you're an old person.

But I feel compelled to a degree of tidiness here that is reflected nowhere else in my life. Give me this.

Because this thing feels like a junk drawer, full of orphaned knobs, mystery keys, old twist-ties. Just shut the drawer, I'm told, but the sight offends my senses. I just know one of those unknown contacts is the potato masher that will turn sideways and I'll never be able to open that drawer again.

Here's another sign I'm old: I have already deleted quite a number of people that God deleted first. Without a twinge, mind you: I don't litter the roadside with teddy bears and I don't need dead people in my contact list unless the smart phones get way smarter.

Once I've deleted my mystery contacts on the new phone, I go to the old phone to add in people I really do know. Yes, those contacts are supposed to be on the new phone, because I shlorped them over with a handy shlorping app, but they're not. I'm not troubling myself with "why" anymore. As it is, I feel lucky I didn't pick up the contact list of the dude walking down the alley when he stopped to drain his Weimaraner.

Lots of people have trouble throwing things away. They think they might need that metal clip some day, or that doorknob, or that hand-scrawled note that no longer makes sense. But I'm surrounded by perfectly useful items like mops and scrub brushes that apparently I've never found a use for. So hitting "delete" is easy for me.

After all, my own brain has decided all on its own what I don't need to know anymore. I'll be searching for a name, or a word, or the reason I walked into a room, and my brain says "Shh, there, there, you don't need to know that," and I've finally come to accept it. It's been a two-step process for my brain: first, go to the Data Department and poke a bunch of holes in it; second, pop over to the department that is supposed to monitor all the loss of inventory in the Data Department, and sing to it until it quits investigating. There was about a five-year lag between step one and step two but now I'm feeling better about it all. I'm pretty sure the third step will involve wearing a medical alert bracelet.

In the meantime, this doesn't hurt my writing at all. You have to get really creative with your metaphors when you can't come up with the word you wanted in the first place.

Echoes In The Braincase

One of the perks of a digital life is it is possible to present oneself to others neatly giftwrapped, and even add a rumpled bow of modesty and self-deprecation. One can think about it. Engineer it. Why, not too long ago one of you fine commenters here said I was "smart."

This is not so easy to pull off in person. And it's particularly hard to do in the presence of younger people. And I don't know what happened, but there are more and more of them around all the time.

I am well tolerated by the younger people in my life, all of whom I cherish. Now they are smart as hell. They have interesting opinions and different perspectives. I like to listen to them and every now and then I like to snap back with something witty. Problem is, a lot of the witty zone coincides with "things I just thought of five seconds ago." And things that happened five seconds ago live in a sort of quickly escaping vapor. I usually remember the first few words of my witty remark, but then I stick in placeholder grunts, hoping the rest of my thought will stroll by, but sometimes it doesn't, and then I have to say "I lost it there, but it'll come back."

The young people give me a fond and indulgent smile and assure me it will come back, even though it won't, and they know that by now. It's embarrassing. But they're so darn nice. "She's slipping," I see in their thought balloons, but you can see smiley emoticons in there too. I can't refute it. The whole thing has led me to be a better listener, or look just like one. I don't enjoy people witnessing my thoughts evaporate. Acting like I'm listening keeps me from looking as foolish, and is a good idea anyway.

I'm not actually listening. I am at first, but then I start thinking of something else altogether, usually a scene in a novel, or a reminiscence, or the state of the world, and my only connection to the conversation at that point is the attentive look on my face that I hope is still pointed in the correct direction. AND THIS IS WHEN I'M TALKING TO INTERESTING PEOPLE.

Authentic Old Person, With Bran

I'm not as embarrassed around people my own age. We're all kind of a mess. True, in my case some of them watch my neurons failing to connect and secretly put it down to the beer, but they understand anyway. If it wasn't the beer, it'd be something else.

There's a theory going around among older people that this phenomenon has something to do with having one's head so filled with wisdom that some of it needs to be off-loaded, and we have gained insight into what is important to keep and what is not. This is, of course, self-serving baldercookies. The fact is, if there were any more dead air in our brains our neurons wouldn't even touch each other.

Herewith a real dialog example:

     Me: "I'm trying to think of that word. You know, that word? That means, like, you really enjoy something, but it isn't anything you did yourself."

     Person: "Plagiarism?"

     Me: "No, no, more like something...vicarious." 

     Person: "Hmm. Vicarious?"

     Me: "Yeah! That's it! Thanks!" [bounces away]

     Person: [listens for head rattle]

Yes. That really happened. Probably. I do write fiction. It's either real or it's not, I don't remember.

Senile In Three Languages

If you live long enough, your language begins to get holes in it. It's like any other fabric you've nearly loved to death. Most of the holes in my home-team language have developed in places formerly occupied by nouns. I'll be traipsing along in a merry conversation and suddenly I'm brought up short at the edge of a pit, looking into it for my noun. They come back eventually. It's like how you shake out a sweater that you'd folded up from the laundry a while back, and out comes a sock that had been missing long enough that the mate had been thrown away. Same thing with nouns. You'll be having a conversation and someone is going on and on about the plutocracy, and then something he says shakes up your brain-closet and a noun you were looking for days ago drops out. "OTTOMAN!" you shout, suddenly and irrelevantly, which does nothing to shine up your reputation for mental acuity. The point is, things turn up.

There's no real point in looking for the word if you can't find it right away. The other day I was looking for (it turned out) "celibacy," when really nothing else would do, and I almost had it cornered (I'm pretty sure it starts with a "v"). It's not an odd word, not one that should turn up missing on your average day; it's the kind of word that probably comes in a twelve-pack at Costco, nothing unusual about it at all; but it's gone for the moment and that's all there is to it. There's a word for this phenomenon, and I don't remember what it is, but we might as well call it "dementia" because that's what everyone else calls it. I got to wondering if dementia manifests itself differently in different languages.

There are fundamental differences in the way languages are set up and they might even affect the way the speaker thinks. For instance, I am told that there is no word for "no" in Gaelic. If you speak Gaelic, you have to indicate a negative by recasting the question. If someone says "do you have new shoes?" and you don't, you have to say "I do not have new shoes." This simple deficit in Gaelic led to some terrible famines in days of old, when the Romans came through bearing platters of pasta and speaking a mile a minute and said "have you eaten?" and the Irish said "we have..." and that was that for the Romans--they kept on going and talking a mile a minute and didn't stick around for the "...not eaten."

My suspicion is that the Germans have the best setup for dealing with dementia. They already concoct their nouns as though demented and have a lot of practice. They would call an ottoman something like the thingonthefloorforputtingthefootsenonen, which is just the way I have started to speak. So nobody's going to notice. By the time they get to where they can't whomp up a noun on command, it works even better. The Germans start out their sentences by laying out all available nouns and then let you know what they want done to them later on in the sentence. They're not going to get caught halfway into their thought and then pull up short, gesticulating wildly, face screwed up, so God and everybody can tell they've just blown a fuse. No, they won't say anything at all; they can't get a purchase; they're thwarted from the get-go. They will remain silent. And be thought wise.