Voice-Dictated Breadcrumbs, Murky Memories, & Burnt Shards of Matter

The latest notes from the road

🔒 You’re reading a paid subscribers-only post with author-voiceover and a free preview. Thank you for supporting this work.

Paid subscriptions make it possible for me to dig deeper, publish more frequently, and remain independent.

Prefer to offer one-time support? You can leave a tip to keep this project going by clicking the link of your choice: (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe)

Thank you for reading—and for making writing like this possible.

---

Memory is a funny thing.

I take notes while I drive, voice-dictated breadcrumbs to help me find my way back to the people and places and things that I saw.

I could be like little Marco, I guess, embellishing my visions of Mulberry Street under the withering gaze of my too-serious father, or father-surrogates in my imaginary audience. Why settle for the banality of commonplace things when your imagination can soar?

But the real world is full of texture and grit, color and sound, and viewed correctly, there can be something masterful in the mundane.

Unless I take too long.

Unless the notes sit out on the counter like last Tuesday’s leftovers, untouched, until fermentation and fungi have their way.

“Neighbor description,” it says on the first line. I have no idea what this means. Which neighbor? Why would I describe them? Was this supposed to trigger a recollection?

“$37.52 worth of gas.” Again, I don’t even know what that is supposed to make me think of.

I used to be better at this.

In college, I only took the notes that seemed most important. After freshman year, I stopped buying the books for my classes. They were overpriced, I was broke, my ability to focus on the reading was badly compromised, and I got by on the lectures just fine anyway. The looseleaf notepaper that filled my three-ring binders bore the evidence of my distracted attention. Sinewy lines in black ink that started as random shapes and curves would become elaborate spaceships, or aliens, or robots.

I actually went back years later and saved many of them, even though I threw the class notes they were drawn on away.

Some teachers don’t like it when students doodle. They don’t understand that far from being a sign of disrespect, it means they have our full attention, the distraction-magic being warded off by channeling it into innocuous forms.

My friends would give me puzzled looks as I screwed around while they all got together to prep for the latest test.

“Aren’t you going to study?” my friend Joe asks, in a memory that’s almost 30 years old. It’s not the first time he’s said this to me, and a frantic edge creeps into his voice that sounds like a mixture of incredulity and amusement.

“I don’t need to.” I replied with what I’m certain looked like an annoying smirk. “I’ll brush up on my notes a little bit later.”

And when it was over, and we all got our grades, and mine were as good or better than those who’d spent stressed-out nights with their heads down over flash cards and books, a second wave of friendly admonishments would come. I was an unserious enigma. A bad student who happened to get a lot of As. And it was annoying to everyone who wasn’t me.

But my memory was something I couldn’t switch off any more than my attention span was something I could switch on. My brain just worked the way it did, and I had learned to ride that wave rather than fighting it. It got me through a double major, a half dozen or so tours through the Dean’s List, and just a fraction of a GPA point below Magna Cum Laude at graduation.

I thought everything in life would be that easy. I had no idea how anything worked.

A couple years later, I’d be diagnosed with OCD and ADHD, and handed a bottle of SSRIs. I took them until they made me a zombie, then quit cold turkey, because nobody ever told me not to.

The room spun for days.

These days, I have no way of knowing what I’ll remember. What will stay and what will go. I’ll recall, in detail, some obscure list of facts I learned years ago, but forget something I was sure I didn’t need to write down until all I remember was thinking that I didn’t think I needed to write it down. And sometimes, even when I do write it down, I trust far too much in my pattern matching ability to tease out the full context of a fragmented phrase.

“Haruki Murakami quote and need for book,” the next note says.

Hmm. I remember liking a quote from him. I remember thinking I needed to try reading Murakami again after an initial failed attempt, 15 years ago, at tackling 1Q84. But what was the quote? Did I save it? I open my Google photos app, and begin scrolling through all the scraps and fragments of my visual storage system.

It’s not there. Or at least, I don’t see it between all the screenshots of inspirational quotes and photos of random things and funny little memes and menu snapshots from restaurants I visit for work but never go back and order from. I look through my downloads folder. I search Substack and X.

Whatever it was, it was so profound that I somehow utterly failed to save it anywhere. I must have thought it would stay with me, or got distracted before I finished acquiring a record of it for later use.

In any case, it’s time to go work.

My hair is a mess, which is an ironic thing, considering how little of it is left on the top of my head. I grab my baseball cap and throw it on. The hat says, “Trevor’s - Scottsdale.” I got it from a bougie liquor store I used to go to on occasion when I still lived out that way. I’m not a hat guy, but I like the look of it. It’s distressed, with a weathered-looking mesh back, and a cool logo patch on the front that makes it look almost like vintage gear. I still need a haircut every few weeks for the parts that still grow, and I wonder for the hundredth time whether I should just shave the whole thing. Go for the bald guy with a beard look.

But then I’d still probably end up wearing a hat a lot of the time, because my Irish/Slovak scalp will just burn in the sun. And wearing a hat is the thing I don’t like doing. I don’t like having things on my head, or in my mouth, or in my ears. Drives me crazy. My mom told me that when I was a kid, if the seams in my socks weren’t oriented just right, I would tell her they were full of “crumbs.” I’ve already given up on CPAP and I’m close to doing the same with my Invisaligns.

I finally found some earbuds I like, though. Lightweight, open ear, sound transmitted through bone conduction. You can still hear everything going on around you, but they can’t hear your music or your book. Perfect for when I’m working. I thought I lost them the day they arrived, before I ever got to try them, but it turns out I just forgot them on my desk at home.

I’d have bet money that I’d slipped them into my pocket and they’d fallen out somewhere. “I could’ve sworn…” are becoming my famous last words.

What will I be like when I’m old? Will I tell stories from decades before, but be unable to remember what I had for breakfast? Will I remember the people I love?

Will I die alone?

I felt that fear, sharp as a knife, late last night, as I was lying in bed, re-watching an old TV show I used to love, and am learning to love again.