All the high school sweethearts from this year and last year and every other year are gathered in the gym. You remember her. You remember him. The band plays every couple’s honor song but nobody takes the floor except the King and Queen of Memory. Maybe a few sweethearts are still in love with each other but everybody else is just sipping nostalgia from a plastic cup. Funny how beautiful our scars become. After the band plays one last ballad, a few stragglers linger at the door, wanting more, please, a little more, but everybody else will say goodbye to their favorite ghost and travel home, fast or slow, to whom they treasure most. — Sherman Alexie, “All the High School Sweethearts” Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Memories
Aside
Although experiences may seem solid, they are passing memories.
Thomas Jefferson: Snails, Coups and Fake News
My fellow Americans – I recently read that scientists at UCLA made snails “remember” things that never happened. Why am I not impressed? Snails?! We have fake news that makes people remember things that never happened. Remember the “attempted coup” at the U.S. Capitol last week? That never happened. That’s what the fake news called it: an “attempted coup.” What is a coup? Isn’t it overthrowing an existing government and replacing it with a new one? The government is not a building. It’s not a room. Stealing Nancy Pelosi’s lectern doesn’t make you the new leader of the country. It’s not that easy. We declared a coup in 1776. But we still had to fight a war for the next seven years to actually make it real. There was no coup or attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol. You just remember something that never happened. Read more →
This Was the Room I Had to Live In
This was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories. — Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep Read more →