Speak, Memory … Um, Hello? Memory?

My memory is very, very bad. I can look at something that I need to remember to take with me when I leave the house — a library book, for example, or the mailbox keys, or that movie that I’ve been meaning to lend my mom for weeks — I can look at it, and say to myself: You will not under any circumstances forget to bring this with you. You have forgotten to bring this with you every time you’ve made this pledge before, but this time will be different, because this time you will (1) make a mantra out of it, (2) place the item in front of the door from which you must exit the house, and (3) exhort your wife to remind you to bring it with you.

I can say this to myself before I go about my pre-departure business, chanting the don’t-forget-it mantra under my breath: “Don’t forget the thing don’t forget the thing must not forget the thing don’t forget the thing” over and over again as I make my way up the stairs and into the kitchen, where the mantra becomes “Don’t forget the thing don’t forget the wow I’m hungry ooo look a banana don’t forget the jesus is that a cockroach how the hell did must not forget the thing don’t forget the thing.” And, after eating the banana and crushing the cockroach, I go up one more flight of stairs to my room, where the mantra becomes “Don’t forget the god I’ve got to pay these bills I can’t believe it’s getting dark already man I love bananas I wish more food was yellow.” And so on.

A few minutes later, I make my way downstairs again, humming a pleasant tune under my breath, nod agreeably when my wife reminds me not to forget about the thing, and then step over it on my way out the door.

I might remember it a couple of hours later, when I’m at the place where I needed to have it. Or I might not. It’s 50-50.

Having a bad memory is crippling. People don’t realize how crippling it is. I could never be a doctor, for example, because of all the extravagant memorization that’s required; all those body bits and diseases and disorders have names, and the names have to be memorized at least long enough to get you past your boards. I could never in a million years do that. I still remember, with real pain, the disappointment on my AP Biology teacher’s face when she told me, after grading a particularly grueling exam, that she had expected so much more from me. I had too. I really had. I loved biology. But love, for all its sweetness, is no salve for a poor memory. Just ask my wife, preferably on the day after our anniversary.

It’s also a social liability, of course. I have enough trouble talking to people as it is, but the problem is compounded infinity-fold when I can’t remember their names, or what they do, or how I know them. I very often can’t even summon enough facts to carry on a simple conversation: the name of the really big country that makes all the vodka, for example, or who won the recent presidential race between — um — the tall boring guy and — er — the dumb one; or what I do for a living; or, on especially bad days, what my name is. All of these things escape me at the most inopportune times, fleeing like startled deer when I need them most.

And it’s a problem at work. The internet, and the rudimentary search facilities that computers provide these days, have saved my life: as long as I’m sitting in front of a box with a network connection, there’s no programming fact that I can’t discover in a couple of seconds, leaving me free to forget almost everything I know. Which I do. On a regular basis. But still, it would be wonderful to have these facts on hand: it would speed things up immeasurably, and it would allow me analyze problems in toto, with all the variables and difficulties and solutions splayed out on the same surface, as it were, so that I could rearrange them at will. There’s no mulling when you have a bad memory. Anything mildly complex that you need to figure out, you figure out on paper, or you don’t figure out at all.

But I’m not complaining. Ok, I am complaining. But I should also acknowledge that failing to remember almost everything that’s ever happened to me has its advantages. I get to enjoy the same things repeatedly, for example, and can be surprised by the same good news over and over again. Hey! Check it out! The toaster’s fixed! I say, and my wife says: It’s been fixed for a week. You fixed it. You’ve been happy about it for a week. And I say: Oh, a little abashed, and leave the room. Then, a little while later, I come back in and say: Hey! The toaster’s fixed!

Also, I don’t remember bad news for very long, unless it’s crushingly bad news; the small bad things, the tiny demons, tend to fade away. Which is, in each case, a very tiny blessing; but they add up.

Still: I’m tired of forgetting everything. And as the bloom of my youth fades into the gloom of my middle age and, eventually, the doom of my dotage, the problem’s only going to get worse. If I’m ever to achieve my great and lofty ambitions — indeed, if I’m ever to discover what those ambitions are — then I need to figure out a way to retain something more than the difference between left and right. And, because I’ve spent much of the last sixteen years in front of computers, organizing ones and zeroes into — um — long string of ones and zeroes, and because when you’re a hammer every problem looks like a nail, I’ve decided that my salvation lies in computers.

What I’m after is simply this: a memory extension program. I don’t mean a memory enhancer, because my faculties are what they are, and, like the rest of me, remain remarkably impervious to improvement; I don’t mean a simple memory supplement, a formalization of the old expedients of scrawled lists and ubiquitous post-it notes; and I don’t mean a memory goad, strings wrapped around fingers, abecedarian menageries of impromptu mnemonics. I mean the real deal: something that extends my memory by supplying what it lacks.

But I haven’t been able to find anything quite like that. I mean, there are a lot of organizational tools out there, digital scrapbooks, computer diaries, stuff like that. And I’m sure they’re all quite good, but they all tend to nibble around the edge of the problem. Nothing really tackles it.

What I need is a complete mnemonic system, something that weaves itself into my life, insinuates itself into everything I do; something that archives all the data that comes my way, organizes it, and provides some sort of natural and effortless interface to retrieve it. A personal google that’s so integrated into my everyday routine that it becomes essentially indistinguishable from my actual memory.

There’s a movie called Johnny Mnemonic — based on the short story by William Gibson — that has at its center a courier whose memory has been augmented to accept huge payloads of data, which he ferries from place to place. Now, this is a very bad, no-good, terrible horrible not-watchable movie that you should avoid at all costs (it features Keanu Reeves attempting to — shudder — act), but I mention it because it points out the basic problem with all the memory augmentation programs I’ve seen: ease of use, and access. In the movie, the mnemonic courier had to use special machinery to implant and retrieve his payload, and has essentially no access to it while it’s in his head. The organizational systems out there aren’t quite that bad, but they have similar problems: it’s not effortless enough to store the data you need, and it’s not easy enough to access it.

So that’s the challenge. Invent a memory system that provides effortless insertion paradigms, and instant access interfaces. I have some ideas on how to do this, and, I must say, they’re absolutely brilliant. So I’m going to set them down here, before I forget them forever. That would be the supreme irony: failing to remember the principles behind the most perfect mnemonic system ever imagined, precisely because that system is not yet available.

And so, without further ado, my brilliant idea.

Ahem.

Um.

Huh.

Er.

Hmmm.

Crap.