I GUESS IT DOESN'T MATTER

  I have deleted so much from so many unfinished written pieces I can’t remember what has survived and what was dumped without a second thought. Sometimes just framing the language meets the need to write. If nothing else it’s therapeutic.

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I don’t do this very often but this will be one of those times. I am rewriting my last blog post. So it’s a different piece of work even though it deals with the same ideas. The idea I came up with originally isn’t bad but it feels a little fractured and I can do better. I have a fifty-ish friend about the age of my kids, we don’t always see things the same but it doesn’t get in the way. His backstory is wide and deep and he likes to think he knows all of the why’s and how’s of how his journey has shaped his personality, values, beliefs, etc. I like to think that the self-analysis task is a lot easier said than done. The human animal is hard wired to overestimate our own ability to read the tea leaves and connect the dots. That is the premiss that I began with. 
I introduced ‘Confabulation’, the unintentional creation of false or distorted memories to fill in the gaps in an incomplete memory. Those distorted memories are usually attributed to a medical condition (amnesia, dementia, etc.) but a healthy mind can also loose or misplace parts of a memory. The remembering part of the brain is subject to a constant stream of information and there has to be a way to sort out the irrelevant stuff and keep the rest. Even then the mind keeps sorting and deleting; short term memory. The point is; even though we pay attention a great amount of detail in a particular sequence of events is lost from memory. So said, even a healthy memory bank can lose things and the mind creates a fix like a patch on a flat tire; an alternate reflection. 
That remembering part of the brain is a lot like artificial intelligence (AI) software. Give it a story that is full of holes and it will fill in the holes with a plausible but fabricated substitute to complete the story. The person remembering has no reason to doubt the authenticity of the altered memory. A healthy case of Confabulation: If it doesn’t cause a problem then I guess it doesn’t matter. But I can connect the dots and understand that it is what it is. I am old enough there has been plenty of opportunity for my old mind to ‘Confab’ my backstory. I like to think I have a handle on how I got to be the present version of ‘Me’. But I don’t have a crystal ball and I can’t trust memory to be perfect. Personality is a complicated soup and develops over time so whatever I am is what I’ve become, one day at a time rather than following a recipe (stir this stuff and then add that stuff and keep stirring).
I’ve been told that the lawyer who defends himself in court has a fool for a client. I would think the same thing for those believing they can solve the riddle of how they got to be the person they are. My friend has a cut & dry rationale for the way he picked and chose his way up to the present. I cannot even address that idea without leaving space for the thousands of individuals whose finger prints are all over my backstory. It’s not only what one chooses but also experiences they never experienced and nobody lives in a vacuum. Add to that, how does one factor random chance into their own destiny?
How did I get to be the person I am? As I remember, I trusted and loved my parents. I always wanted to please my mother and going to church made her happy. I didn’t have to believe anything, just sit still and drop my coin in the offering when it came by. As a young adult my sanctified enthusiasm fell way short of the mark but Mom was looking the other way. It wasn’t until college I learned to question tradition and value the discipline of science and critical analysis. I never thought of it as a major change in course but what did I know? Since then “God is the metaphor that transcends all levels of human comprehension.” (Joseph Campbell). Everything mysterious that we cannot understand is attributed to the metaphor. It came easy, swapping Faith for Good Karma. How it came about is not as important as the fact that it did.
I’ve never been attracted to tobacco or booze. My dad smoked cigarettes but Mom got him to quit and she would not allow booze of any kind in the house. How that low profile unfolded I don’t know.
As memory would have it a good friend and I sneaked cigarettes out of our dad’s smokes and puffed away under a bridge near his house. After a week or so I couldn’t ignore that I didn’t like the taste or the smell and the buzz from getting away with mischief wasn’t fun anymore. It never made me feel grown up or cool. I quit before I could learn to inhale, he didn’t. My friend died of lung cancer twenty years ago. Dun! Good story I suppose, just can’t be sure it’s all true. 
I can only remember being drunk three times, twice in the army and once shortly after I was discharged. What I do remember is being sick and the vomit part. Whatever sense of uninhibited bliss it provided it did not survive the edit. I sip a little wine with food now and an occasional shot of peach brandy but the memory of my head in the toilet, vomit coming out my nose is both powerful and real, too much so for it to be a confabulation.
Yuval Harari is a scholar/writer/historian, the source for one of my favorite quotes: “Whatever it is that you believe, it doesn’t have to be true; it just has to work.” How we get to be the person we see in the mirror, the person others see from afar; that story doesn’t have to be true but it does have to work, to serve a purpose that can be either a virtue or a vice.
I’m going to change the title of this blog post. If nobody notices then it doesn’t matter either. I haven’t received any death threats and my retirement check has never been late so I’ll just stay with what’s been working for all these years.