Memory and Time

I got started making a big list of movies that had an important influence on me and I was trying to remember when I saw those movies, and when I confirmed via IMDB that I’d gotten it all wrong, it got me thinking about memory and the ways we use to remember things or attach them to our timeline in our memory. 

For instance when I think of the period of my life when I moved regularly, I often try to remember which place I was living when an event occurred, or in this case when I saw that movie. Or for the years I was working in the games industry, there’s a tendency to remember things by which crunch time I was stuck in. And here there’s some overlap, example: “I’m pretty sure I was in Diablo II crunch time and living in the house we rented in Westminster when that happened.” It usually helps when there’s some other part of memory to associate with it. For instance, “That happened when we were in Starcraft crunch time and living in Orange, I know because I’d driven past that cemetery and had a long crazed worry about how to drive if a zombie apocalypse began” because I hadn’t slept in like three weeks and shouldn’t have been driving. 

For larger portions of memory I can go by entire regions. If something happened in Seattle, it’s an initial breakdown to the six years I lived there. Though that is already sort of unreliable. A memory from a visit might sneak in. What was I drinking? Booze rarely is a benefit to memory, but I remember my first visit to Seattle we were drinking a lot of Alaskan Amber, whereas when I lived there I was usually drinking everything else…all of it. 

I’ve been thinking about shorter time measurements. There are all sorts of situations where you can’t see a clock. When I spent more time in Casinos I remember trying to measure time by how often the waitress asked for drinks orders, but that had a pretty obvious problem as remembering the number got more difficult as the night or day (who can tell) progressed. When I was working in the games industry I had a rule that if I saw the late night cleaning crew come through more than twice since I’d been home, it was time to go home and at least have a shower. 

All of this is probably pointless as it hasn’t helped explain why I have the MST3K movie, which I know I saw at a special prerelease screening in Hollywood, listed after Free Enterprise. Looking at IMDB, Free Enterprise was released in 1998, MST3k the movie came out in 1996. And now I know my mistake. I was not living in the house in Orange working on Starcraft when MST3k The Movie came out, I was living in the house in Garden Grove and we were working on the first Diablo or was it the Warcraft II Expansion still, maybe the Mac version? Ah well, it’s all a blur.