Where is my mind?

Like actually, where is it?

Where exactly are they located? Our memories. Where are they physically? They couldn’t be more real to us, and when we pull them up or when they just drift into our heads as we’re lying in the dark, where exactly do they come from? We can see the smallest detail in them, hear bits of sound, remember the way the light glinted off the waves in the Caribbean 15 years ago as my four-year-old made dribble castles with her aunt Alden. All those memories are in there. The evidence envelopes of our lived lives. The banker’s boxes stuffed full of everything we’ve done, felt, tasted, heard and seen. Are they all stored in the same place or are they scattered amongst our neurons? Is the sliding of the freight elevator’s gate in the building I grew up in right next to the sensation of slipping into the crack between my grandmother’s beds when I was six watching the Love Boat with her? Are our memories in a physical place, a giant microscopic warehouse in our brains, or are they floating somewhere waiting to be called upon?

there it is, right next to the ark of the covenant

In 2000, they did a study of London cab drivers and found that they have an actual map in their somewhat larger posterior hippo-campuses. It showed that Trafalgar Square is in a different spot than Picadilly Circus and when they asked these drivers to imagine that ride their heads fired on an actual path from one location to another. Amazing. A physical map inside their brains. So by that entirely unscientific logic the Playmobil figure my son named Dr. Higgenhoggen Hoggenhiggen is actually living somewhere in my head.

there’s Kings Cross Station

In my head, I can drive you from Wiscasset Maine right through Damariscotta and make a right on the dirt road where you roll the windows down and get hit with the first smell of the Pemaquid Pond pine trees. It’s real. It’s a thing, with an actual scent I can smell right now. So where is it? I want to know. Where are my kids jumping on that hotel bed in Madrid with my wife’s bras on their heads? Are they anywhere near the feeling of leaping down flights of stairs in my high school? Seemingly unrelated moments tied together by a thread of joy that pops them both, one after another, into my head as I type this out.

Maybe it’s a more logical system. All first kisses in one cabinet and my few actual fist fights in another. Proudest moments stacked up in room 325. Winning a Cannes Lion right next to seeing my child play a song they wrote in front of 73 paying strangers. Let’s file all embarrassment in room 753. Oh hold on, that’s not embarrassing, that’s just actual failure, right down the hall on the left. Where’s the room with the best meals ever eaten. Ah yes, the veal chop with the walnut sauce on the Italian honeymoon drive through the Dolomites in the rental car with the bad clutch, or the first unagi don at Japonica where I had a panic attack because it tasted too good or the lobster chowder at Muscongus Bay. Damn, that room smells fantastic.

There’s no way it’s logical like that. The mind is too beautiful to be organized boringly. I have to believe the filing system is built on something way more intricate, a vast web of interconnected pathways that if ever seen close up would blow the very minds they’re in. Because when one thought pops in there, then leads to another which drags you into a whole third place in an instant, you can only take a back seat and marvel at the magic. How far back will you go? Just last week to the moment your teenaged son put his head on your shoulder because he wanted to be close, or seeing sun rise in your wife’s blue eyes the first night you kissed her 26 years ago? Both real, both in there, both somehow connected. Wonderfully small bits, electrical impulses, tucked deep into cells, just waiting to be recalled, ready to get called up filling you with the feelings that accompanied those moments. They are not facts anymore, nor are they images. They are living mind paintings carrying portfolios of sensations along with them. And yet just when you want to remember the name of the actor who played Cameron in Ferris Bueller it’s a blank slate. Gone. Nothing there. You know him, the guy in Succession… Oh come on. What’s his name?

Alan Ruck. That’s it.