I have a voice recorder in my car. I’ve thought of its existence three times. The first time was driving north on Route 1 out of Raleigh early last year – sick of writing ideas on scraps of paper while driving, I decided that rambling semi-coherently into a recorder would be a more manageable option. One must remain productive while wasting hours in his car after all. Thinking this to be a revolutionary idea (I normally think of things to write about when I don’t have other things to think about, which often occurs while I drive for large expanses of time), I had my mother mail me her old one.
I have now used it twice. Once was during my second trip to Raleigh last year, while on Route 1. The second one was yesterday, right after I got on to Route 1 (again) headed toward Raleigh.
The problem is not that the voice recorder is a bad idea at other times. It’s not that I don’t think of things in the car except for when I’m headed to the dirty south – I do, I just scribble them onto scraps of paper on my steering wheel. The problem is that I forget that the recorder exists.
My brain, and probably yours too, is not organized the way that we structure our computers. At work, certain files are placed in folders associated with certain concepts or projects. If my mind worked like this the “dealing with dangling thoughts for later transcription” container would include the recorder. It doesn’t, because the recorder didn’t exist when the idea of transcribing ideas was first burned into my neural network. As best I can tell, the only folder that includes the recorder is my Route 1 in North Carolina folder. By the way, I hope some time soon that particular folder also includes the concept of avoiding said Route in all circumstances not involving the middle of the night.
Something similar happened this morning, when I couldn’t recall one of my father’s 1972 stories on demand for my favorite bigwhoop lurker, whose contact information I do not possess but could use immediately. One would think I would have a folder for asinine father tales. He is, after all, a gifted story teller. And he’s full of useless stories. You’d think I’d have his entire dossier for instant recall. Instead, the only one that came to mind was his “Night Before the Big Race Against North Carolina When They Tried to Get Him Drunk” story. A classic (when he tells it, I’m not personally invested in it so I tell it poorly), but not from 1972. I drew a blank on 1972, but had extraneous results for North Carolina.
In theory, I’d want to harness my memory in such a way that it does what I want it to do when I want it to do it. As I think about it though, that denies me a fundamental aspect of living in my mind. I don’t want to know what’s going to come out next. I don’t want to be able to behave as I should on demand. If you include sleeping (where one’s dreams can be quite telling and/or interesting), one spends three quarters of his life with only himself.
As with many things, this reverts back to one of my pet philosophies. It’s not particularly profound, nor is it in any way novel (which must, by now, be the next word of the week, given my penchant for dropping it everywhere these last few days), but it will still be one of the top-three items on my “white board o truth” when I finally get one for Christmas. Not only does everyone else occupy a fuzzy probability cloud of possible actions, traits, and mind sets, eluding our capacity to perfectly quantify them, but so too are we random variables even to ourselves. That we are not deterministic makes even our pervasive solitude worth living. No man is an island. It’s worse than that. Not only do we not exist external to the influences of others, but we can’t even isolate ourselves from our own unknowns. A world where one truly did “know thyself” would get dreadfully boring quickly.
Addendum:
Not to spoil the mood or anything, but when does Sports Gal, Sports Guy Bill Simmons’ hilarious wife, get a bigger space than the little block on the side of his column? She’s hilarious. She’s consistently hilarious too. She needs to write a book. Bill Simmons needs to give her the keys.
Steve has no Flavor Ice. I’m dying here.
Words 
This post really frightens me.
You travel with a voice recorder but no emergency box-o-fla-vo-ice?? Shame Shame.
Why would this frighten you?
I DO need an emergency box of flavor ice. In the winter they’d already be frozen in the morning when I go to work. I could have one in the car. I’d be worried about them exploding in the summer heat. There’s nothing worse than a flavor ice box with exploded flavor ice inside. I think I should write them a letter next time I find one. I mail ordered flavor ice in the middle of the winter last year, damnit, they better hear me out.
I have policies about which flavor ices are safe for when I’m leaving the house. Anything other than pink or orange makes you look like you’re wearing lipstick.
This post frightens me, too. But that happens sometimes when I don’t check your site for a few days. Normally I try to make an effort to check it routinely so as to hear a daily perspective from outside my near-utopian subculture. It helps maintain a healthy balance in my life. Otherwise I might forget I’m white.
Neither of you make sense. Especially you, Bess. You make negative sense today.