today tomorrow and yesterday

For the record I was musing this muse as I walked Rowlf this afternoon, and although some solitude, hound excepted, had lifted my mood I was still rather grumpy and off-colour. Basically, I could be talking bollocks. So with that in mind, dear reader, I shall begin.

So Sal and AJ are away for the best part of the next fortnight and I started a row on the day they left. All terribly predictable and over nothing that justifies my being such a prick. Not sure why or how it happens, wish it didn't happen and also wish Sal could get over it as well and as quickly as I do. This got me thinking about how I live my life in the moment as opposed to the past or the future.

I do not have much concept of what my future will be. I have a few plans and ideas but don't really pay much attention to my future. For me the future is just an extension of today. I'm not going to get richer or taller or healthier; I am simply going to plod along and the future will therefore be more of today. Of course I'll do more and learn more and think more, but the trajectory won't change. I take most things, AJ included, as they come. If it turns out to be otherwise then that really is OK and I shall adapt. But I'm not planning for it to be otherwise. I am getting the house renovated and extended because I want a bigger, nicer house now. And I do loads of stuff now so I don't plan on any big trips to see stuff which is likely to be no cooler - though maybe differently cool - to the stuff that is right on my doorstep and that I could see today. Wherever I live.

The peculiar thing is that I have a great concern for the future. Aquarians typically concern themselves more with saving the world than saving themselves, which is interesting but, of course, bollocks. I re-read that last bit and suppose it must be fairly typical, unless you are an especially driven sort?

So hardly anything bothers me in a deep and meaningful way that I keep with me. Certainly nothing personal. I get more pissed by principles - or lack of - than individual people. I have sufficient suspensional fortitude (oh dear, I really am making up some bollocks there) to soak up all the bumps in my road and I drift along in Citroenesque comfort. Or, alternatively, I am an utterly cold bastard, which could be true. I dunno. This knowledge should stop me from being a prick, but instead it allows me to accomodate it. Which is odd.

So the future hasn't happened and therefore doesn't exist and I drift through today. What of the past? This got me thinking about memories and how my memory is piss-poor. I thought this thought a while back but wrote nothing about it. So many people write autobiographies that I become a little concerned about the quality of my memory. Am I - are we - supposed to be able to recall a book full of memories? I could make up a book that would be based upon what I know happened, but can I say I actually remember much? How did I feel, what did I think? I'd have to make a lot of that stuff up; I've certainly not got a bookload of that stuff.

Some of my memories.

I have for decades claimed my earliest memory is being in a boat on a lake in Regents Park. I think. Right now I could not tell you if there are lakes in Regents Park and if they ever had boats upon them. I'd better check I suppose, hold on.

Thank fuck, there is a lake, and it has a boating area. Anyway, it was foggy and I was with my parents and grandparents, all of whom are now dead so I cannot ask them about it. My memory of the boat is that it sat very low in the water. Now this is the odd bit; if I now try to think of it I see the boat from next to the boat and not in it. So unless in my very early childhood I was a duck I have no real memory of what was going on there. So that is my earliest memory and it isn't much of a memory at all. I have a vague recollection of the stairs in the first home I lived in, of a petrol station and a shop that had a bird in a cage. These are snapshot memories which have no context. I have snapshots of my primary school. The assembly hall that was also the gym. I remember the climbing ropes and sitting in assembly and I remember plenty of other stuff as snapshots. Is that the way everyone remembers? The nickname I still have after 32years - I have no actual memory of how it happened.

I have very few physical memories. The most distinct is one of walking through different temperature air masses when I was a kid. The memory is triggered often nowadays; the air along the path through the park at the end of my road is always distinctly cooler than the surrounding areas; you feel the temperature drop as you walk through it. That reminds me of walking across a particular part of land surrounding a lake I spent days fishing when I was in my early teens. It proper reminds me, the physical feeling reminds me. I like that. But is pretty much the only memory of that type that I have.

So, are memories really memories or are they they updated stories we write about ourselves? I really don't know, but I suspect the later is overwhelmingly the case.

So the past isn't really much cop either then.

I'm not sure where this post is going - nowhere, it seems. It was going to be about why I get snappy and snarky, but first the cricket started, and that distracted me until I realised it was shit, and now Air Force One has distracted me. I suspect this will also be shit. So, with my concentration well and truly gone I am going to watch some crap tele and end this.