The Smoothies Aren't Helping
October 28, 2004

Today I left the office and trudged out to the parking garage to my car. The rain that has been cleaning Los Angeles for the past few days had cleared up, so I figured it wouldn't take too long to get home tonight. Plus, I could go do the laundry tonight without having to get drenched.

And then I got to where I parked my car. It wasn't there. I stood there in front of the spot where I had parked, nonplussed, waiting for it to sink in that my car had been stolen and I started shouting curses.

Fortunately, a completely different realization came first -- I was on the wrong floor. My car was parked on the next level down. I had been parking in that spot for the last two weeks. Inexplicably, I took the stairs to the wrong floor.

I trudged back to the stairs. I started walking along and stopped short again after about a minute. Instead of going down a level to where I had parked my car, I had gone up a level and was, for reasons unknown, walking past the Sobeks and Hana Grill on the way back to the office.

I did that thing where you stop for a few seconds and then check your watch before turning around, because it looks really weird when you're walking one way, and then just suddenly stop and walk back the other way. I finally made it back to the car and didn't have any more bouts of absent-mindedness on the way home.

In the past month I have had the following lapses of memory:

• I have forgotten to deposit paychecks for several days.
• I have forgotten to set my alarm clock.
• I have forgotten my I.D. card to get into the office. (twice)
• I have driven off from a gas station with my gas cap sitting on my trunk, requiring its replacement.
• I have forgotten to feed Rory.
• I have locked my keys in my car.

There are probably more things that I've forgotten recently, but, well, you can probably finish that thought.

area carpets 12 x 16 I'd say the growing forgetfulness started about four years ago when I lived in San Diego. I'm not an organized guy. Fortunately I never really needed to be, because I was mentally organized. If I needed to remember something, I could file it away.

Then I started forgetting things I had planned to do. Nothing big -- time I set aside to do my laundry; a movie I had wanted to see over the weekend, a journal entry I wanted to write. Just little personal things. It happens to everybody. It's not like I wasn't expecting it as I grow older. My metabolism has certainly slowed down with age, as my stomach would attest. Becoming more forgetful is normal.

I think now it's worse than I originally believed it was. I can't remember a lot of things that I've experienced in my life. It really hit me when I started thinking about and working in television. I realized when I started this gig working on The Real Gilligan's Island that even though I watched that show all the time when I was younger, I don't remember what happened on a single episode. Not one. I can remember in my mind sitting in front of the television. I can remember watching the show. But I can't remember a single thing that happened. Not even when the Globetrotters came.

It really hit me when I was planning my audition tape for Situation: Comedy One of the questions asked me to detail which sit-com was my all-time favorite. "Futurama" is the correct answer, but I figured I better go with a show with live actors, because that was what the competition is about. I chose Newsradio. The thing is, I loved that show. Loved it. Watched every episode. I used to have the hots for Joe Rogan, which lasted until he resurfaced on Fear Factor looking like a microwaved handbag. But I realized, again, I couldn't remember a single episode.

This is really a disconcerting thing when you want to do something like write television shows for a living. If nothing else, it feeds my irrational fear that I'm going to plagiarize something I've seen or read without realizing it.

It's normal. It must be normal. I can't imagine what would happen to my brain if I could remember everything I've seen on television or in the movies. But to hardly remember any of it? Somebody sent me a DVD from my Amazon.com wishlist as a gift. It was a documentary about gays and the Holocaust. It was a really sweet gift and I appreciated it a lot. (I may have forgotten to send a thank-you card. Sorry!) The minute I started watching it, I realized that I had already seen it before. But I couldn't remember where for the longest time (I finally remembered seeing some of the movies from a gay film festival in San Diego). And even as I was watching it, I couldn't actually remember the content I had seen. They were familiar faces telling a story I didn't remember watching.

I'm talking to Sushi in AIM as I'm writing this surprised at the dark turn this is taking. This was supposed to be a funny entry. Oh, look how silly and forgetful I am! I didn't realize this was eating at me the way it is until I started really documenting how much I've forgotten.

I've been stopping by the Robeks where I work and getting a smoothie with memory supplements just about every day. It doesn't seem to be doing anything, which certainly doesn't do wonders for my cynicism toward natural supplements.

What happens if it gets worse? There's a very significant gap in my early memory. I can't remember anything prior to a certain day in my childhood -- the day when my family moved into a new apartment building somewhere in Massachusetts. I was all of four years old, so of course, I'm not going to remember things. But … nothing? My first memory is waking up in the back seat of a car as we were moving. We were going over a bridge. That can't be right. For a short while before this move we all lived on a farm, apparently. There were horses. I only know this from my Dad telling me. My sister remembers it well, though she's only a year older than I am. I don't remember anything at all.

I worry irrationally because I'm a control freak about my own mind and I don't know what I'd do if I start forgetting things from my past that are actually important to me. I worry that not being able to remember names and shows will make me even more awkward socially, particularly in this environment I'm now in.

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