A few months ago, Katy Perry’s cleavage raised eyebrows on Sesame Street. I personally, was very disappointed. I thought that Sesame Street was long dead. As it turns out, Sesame Street is still out there, motoring along as always, minding its P’s and Q’s (and so on), still managing to coerce those poor suckers in the alphabet into the daily sponsorship of its programming, even though I’m pretty sure the nation’s 4-year-olds are fairly saturated by the marketing of the Letter E by now. Besides, the allowance for picking up your cars and balls can hardly justify all this “brought to you by….!” nonsense.
The point is (there is one), Sesame Street is still there. I just stopped paying attention to it. It died to me. It disappeared from my view, and I ceased to acknowledge its existence as a part of my life. When I am occasionally reminded of its existence, I say to myself, “aww, that’s nice, they’re still doing the same old stuff they always do.” (Albeit with more breasts that I recall). It’s quaint in its own little way. I might change, but Sesame Street is always the same.
My attention span is not particularly long. I fail to retain many useful pieces of information. For instance, if you get a hair cut, I will notice that you got one…but will be utterly unable to recall what the previous one looked like. If we repaint the bathroom, I’ll forget what the previous paint color was. If I settle the free-will/predestination debate in my head, I’ll cease to remember that Arminian folk are still making a raucous, and will be mildly surprised when someone else brings the matter up, as though it’s still going on. People tend to think that I’m intelligent, but I’ve never really understood this inability to retain things that I’ve since deemed settled and done with – the best that I’ve been able to come up with is that I have a lot of RAM, but not a whole lot of hard disk space. I’m good at doing a lot of things at once, but not good at storing the information for later recall.
It extends beyond trivia and concepts. It extends to even supposedly foundational things such as feelings, relationships, and faith. I experience certain emotions quite vividly. But then they go away and I forget how I was able to have them in the past. I’ll meet someone who I was once close to, and forget the manner in which I was close to them. It’s worrisome. With people, I make efforts to keep a regular communication with old friends, lest I forget them and never re-remember. I jot down notes to myself, have Outlook remind me of important things, and formulate rules that govern the order of my life in such a way that I can reproduce events, feelings, arrangements in a self-consistent manner; it looks like recollection, but is really recreation.
At the moment, and for the last many moments, it has been God and his array of associate accouterments that I have forgotten. I’m reminded, and there it is, the same as it ever was, still brought to me by the letter J, still doing colors and numbers and eating cookies and whatever (though still no Katy Perry – who I had by the way not heard of before she and the twins debuted with Elmo).
It’s troublesome, all this forgetting. It makes you wonder how much is real and anchored, how deep the roots of reality dig, when the moment is all that there is to see and live. If things past are dead in the current, what are they really? It’s a fancy trick he pulled – before Abraham was, I am. It’s the answer to the riddle, somewhere somehow. But Sesame Street IS too…for those who are there with it.
Words 
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