Some people say you’ll remember what’s important, and I think that’s bullshit. I have very little control over what I remember, and what I do remember has no discernible correlation with what’s important, to me or anyone else. I remember that Howard Hughes lent his name, as a cover, to a secret CIA operation to recover the Soviet submarine K-129 that sank in 1968. The project took six years and still to this day very little is known about what was recovered. But without a prompt I couldn’t tell you more than a handful of my closest friends birthdays. I would gladly forget everything I know about any clandestine salvage beneath the Pacific to remember those birthdays, to remember to send a postcard to my Grandma from time to time, to remember that I’ve run out of onions when I’m at the market, not after I’ve started cooking.

But my mind is filled with the like of the former, and I don’t remember any of the latter, and sometimes that makes me want to scream.