Every time I kiss you girl, you taste like pork and beans

My last post sparked a couple of comments, to which I'll say that the answer to Dan's first question is, err, kinda. I don't particularly feel that the chapters of my life are in anyway fluid, or overlap. If I look back in a strictly chronological manner, I find, like Hazel, simple convenient blocks that stack up individually and I don't feel that these blocks have shifted at all over the years.

But then again, that's less a set of memories and more a timeline. Within each block are multiple unique memories at which point I'd agree with the comment that: "memories are not something we have, so much as remembering being something we do; it's an active process." As I see it, the way we experience each moment in our lives is determined by where and who we are, an ever changing process, interdependent on all other experiences; as diverse as the sum total of all our knowledge to date to how much we had to drink the night before. Each moment we recall is then in itself, written by not only those events around it, but a myriad of other factors that may be vastly different from those we experienced when we were in the moment itself. The ultimate truth of our recall is inevitably utterly unique and unquestionably questionable.

It's illustrated quite nicely by a scene in a Robin Williams movie I watched recently. The basic premise for The Final Cut, is that at some point in the future we'll be able to graft organic cameras to our retinas that record our every experience. When we die, 'cutters' (Robin Williams) go through the tapes, cutting together a montage for family and friends to be played at a remembering ceremony (essentially the funeral). After one such screening, the deceased's brother questions a boat they used to play in thinking that it was a different colour from the one he saw. Where the images may reveal the ultimate truth of the event, they can't recreate the experience, devoid of the emotions behind the eyes. It's not a bad movie, flawed, but worth a look.

I spent the weekend away with the family and so missed the last night of drinking on the tube. Thankfully. Sounded like the party pretty much played in to the hands of the naysayers, no matter how badly organised the mechanics of the ban may have been. Never let it be said that we don't have the propensity to turn ourselves into a bunch of useless fuckwits given half an opportunity.

Talking of useless fuckwits, whoever decided to use graphic images of violence to deter young kids from stabbing each other somehow managed to miss the point that images of violence and bloodshed are often quite appealing to teenagers (boys especially), be it Friday 13th or GTA 4.

Anyway, here's a picture of chicken



Sampling the music of Old Crow Medicine Show