Farewell to Re-Bar

 

Re-bar

     Oh Re-bar when I saw those tall buildings going up all around you, I thought, sooner or later they would get to you. I hope you do reopen in South Seattle and I’ll look forward to that day but I will miss walking down the street and seeing that iconic arrow over the entrance as I turn the corner on Howell street. I remember the first time I walked through your doors. It seemed like you were in the middle of nowhere. It was in September 2005 and it was for a burlesque show called “Back to School” hosted by Indigo Blue. It was a benefit show for victims of Hurricane Katrina. At that show I met Tamara The Trapeze Lady, Red Delicious and Heidi Von Haught. I had just purchased my first ever DSLR camera and I snapped a bunch of photos that night. Over the next 15 years I snapped thousands more. But I won’t take any more photos there and I will never walk through your doors on Howell street again. But let me put aside my sadness and resentments and instead express my gratitude for you.

Memories and The Mind

Jim Henson and Sammy Davis Jr.

    I like to think of our minds are like computers. There’s a hard drive, apps, an operating system and RAM. The part of our brain that stores everything we’ve ever known and learned is like the Hard Drive. I like to think of our 5 senses as apps. RAM is all our thoughts and actions throughout the day, anything at the forefront of our mind at a given time; I’ve got to deal with that project at work today, brushing my teeth, do I really want to leave my house tonight, Christina Applegate, oh shit that bill is overdue, running for the train because I see it’s in the station so I’ve got to fly down that staircase to make it and what the hell am I really doing with my life? All those sorts of things. Sometimes my RAM is wonky. It’s hard to access the hard drive or my apps are running slow so it needs to be optimized, like with some coffee. Some folks use cocaine. The things that interest me most though are what we know and what we remember as it relates to our personal lives.
     Of course everyone is different when it comes to these things. Everyone has different processors in their brains and different capacities for understanding and remembering. But I doubt anyone can recall what they were thinking or doing on September 12th, 1998, unless that was the day they got married. We do not remember the mundane and ordinary things of everyday life, even if at that time they seemed so important. We may not even remember the non-mundane stuff either, but I believe all our experiences are stored deep in the tissues of our minds. If we see a picture from one day 20 years ago of that time when you and your friends went to the lake, we may recall all sorts of memories that will come rising to the top from deep within our hard drive, to our RAM: The fun you had riding on the jet ski, smoking weed with a power hitter and having sex in a canoe where that family on the motor boat totally saw you. Without the photo though, you probably wouldn’t have thought about any of those things, well maybe you’d still recall having sex in the canoe. But my point is we can only recall so much. And you probably won’t remember your moment to moment thoughts of that day even with that photo. And even within our limits of memory and knowledge sometimes, like computers, our brains can get corrupted.