If You Remembered Every Day of Your Life

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I haven’t been feeling communicative lately, so I’ve got a backlog of interesting articles to mention, like this one from New York Magazine. It’s called “What It’s Like to Remember Almost Everything That Has Ever Happened to You”. It’s about a woman who has Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM): 

For a given date, I could probably tell you something that happened to me on that day, where I was in life, and the emotions attached to that. When I’m recalling these memories I’m really back there, emotionally. I’ll remember how I was feeling at a certain time very vividly. Prior to being diagnosed with HSAM I always wondered: Am I just a sensitive person? I’ve always been deeply impacted by things…. 

In general, I’m not good at remembering fashion; maybe because I don’t care about clothes. But I can remember the weather. I go directly to a moment, or a date, and then zoom out from there. I’ll remember what I experienced or how I felt on a particular calendar day and I’ll start thinking about that time period — here’s what I was going through, here’s what I was doing, and then from that point forward it’s a sensory experience like I’m reliving the day or time….

Sometimes it’s great because there will be good experiences associated with certain memories. I’m grateful to have had more good than bad in my life. Today, I can go back about 20 years or so and if given a date I can tell you usually at least one thing that was happening on that day as I experienced it. Some days, I honestly don’t remember, but that’s rare and I can usually remember the day after or before. The memory will trigger images, sentiments, emotions—literally the way someone looked in a certain light or something like that.

I often wonder why I’ve forgotten so much of my own past, yet keep returning to certain moments. Why did those particular events make such an impression? Is it possible that some people remember a few things so vividly that they don’t have the capacity to remember much else?

If I ever write my life story, it will be a mosaic.

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Or rather a plain broken by the occasional big rock.

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I highly recommend the article. As I remember, it’s quite good.

Of No Consequence At All, But Nice Anyway

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Here’s one of those coincidences that make the world seem nicely symmetrical:

I happened to be looking for a version of the old Irving Berlin song “Blue Skies” this afternoon and eventually found a good one by the American jazz singer Maxine Sullivan, recorded in 1937:

Maxine Sullivan’s biggest hit, somewhat oddly, was her jaunty recording of the traditional Scottish tune “Loch Lomond”. That’s why her greatest hits CD (shown in the video above) was called “Loch Lomond: Greatest Hits 1937-1942”.

While listening to “Blue Skies”, however, I noticed a video for a 60s group from Boston called the Rockin’ Ramrods. It’s called “Bright Lit Blue Skies” and is pretty good:

Now, somewhere along the way, the Rockin’ Ramrods shortened their name and became the Ramrods. This, however, led to some confusion, because a rock band from nearby Connecticut already went by that name. 

These other Ramrods had one hit, an instrumental version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky”. Unfortunately, their follow-up single, released in 1960, didn’t become a hit.

But it was called “Loch Lomond Rock”:

If only they’d called it “Rockin’ Loch Lomond”. That would have been perfect.

Republicans Are Evil (Blogging Made Easy)

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The Guardian reports:

Ohio Republicans push law to keep all details of executions secret.

They don’t want anyone, not even the courts, to know how executions are carried out in Ohio, because the gory details make capital punishment look bad.

Political Postmortem and Forecast

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Like many of us, I read some articles analyzing the recent election. None of them were very surprising. It was noted that, of the one-third of the electorate who voted, many were angry, scared old white people who don’t mirror the electorate as a whole and especially dislike our first black President; our midterm elections favor Republicans, and the electoral map was especially bad for Democrats this year; Americans insist on reelecting their own Senators and Representatives even though they hate Congress as a whole; the average voter is quite ignorant; negative advertising works; and 2016 will be better.

Of the articles I read, I thought this analysis by Andrew O’Hehir was worth sharing. It’s called “Democracy on the critical list: How do we escape this toxic political cycle?” After some painfully entertaining discussion of the election, O’Hehir concludes that “the upshot of all this is that nothing got done in the last Congress and nothing will get done in the next one, but this time the nothing will be a lot scarier to watch”.

He then asks:

Is there any plausible way out of this obsessive, recursive cycle, in which we can expect to see President Clinton 2.0 take office in January of 2017 with a feeble and ineffective Democratic majority, only to be punished for her feminist acts of treason by the resurgent angry white men in 2018, and so on, ad nauseam?

He considers four scenarios:

First, a charismatic, transformational leader will come along who can bring us together, much like some Democrats (apparently including Barack Obama himself) believed President Obama would do. You may remember this scenario from The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which the transformational leader came from another world.

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Second, the opposition will see the error of its ways and realize the other side was right all along. This is even less likely than scenario #1.

Third, our changing population will move our politics to the left. O’Hehir recognizes that American society is changing, but isn’t convinced our politics will change as a result. As more Hispanics do better economically, for example, they may move to the right. The same thing may happen with today’s younger voters as they grow older. (Personally, I wouldn’t rule this out. Politics tends to run in cycles and there may yet be a progressive reaction to the Age of Reagan.)

Fourth, some cataclysm will lead to the current system collapsing, leading to martial law, mass incarceration, revolution and so on. I think he’s joking when he mentions Senator Ted Cruz losing the Presidency and getting the South to secede. He also considers natural disasters and financial collapse. (One possibility he doesn’t mention is a really bad virus, like the one Obama was supposed to do something about. Its name eludes me.)

Instead of any of these alternatives, O’Hehir thinks it’s more likely that our democracy will simply fade away, as “tiny cadres of the ultra-rich squabble over control of the economy, [while] electoral politics is angrily contested over a narrow but contentious range of lifestyle issues, [driving] away all but the most committed culture warriors on either side….In due course the political stalemate between Republicans and Democrats stops mattering, stops existing and is gone with the wind”.

It’s hard to be optimistic about America’s future. O’Hehir certainly isn’t. The only answer I see is that more people have to start caring enough to pay attention to politics and actually vote. The system still allows for the government to represent the majority of Americans, but only if the majority of Americans wisely choose who their representatives will be.