Some thoughts on memory

A quick foreword, I think this is a poorly structured post. But I think that fits into the theme of the post.

There is this game called TrackMania. If you don’t know what that is, it’s just a racing game where you just repeatedly try your hardest to get the best time on a track. You can spend hours going for a track record over and over, to try and get the best time in your county, country, continent, or the world. I love it.

I first played it August 2007 with TrackMania United. I have remained bad at it nearly on 20 years later, but I still really enjoy playing the series.

There’s this specific memory I have about TrackMania is from December 2007. Me being a stupid 13 year old, I must have downloaded a virus from some nefarious website trying to pirate video games. I had to play BioShock that badly apparently. In the process, someone stole my Steam account.

There were a lot of reasons to be upset. I lost access to Team Fortress 2, a game I still also play to this day. I had also just created one of the most popular GarrysMod addons on the official add-on website (it was a single Lua file), and as a wee lad I was already fielding support questions on how to install it. This taught me a lot of what I didn’t want to do as I got older. I ended up doing that anyway.

Distraught, I sent Steam an email. Thankfully I was able to provide them with enough information for them to reset my accounts password. Back to gaming within a couple of days.

The hacker however, had been a bit cheeky. They had loaded up my TrackMania, and if you’ve used Steam it provides you with the CD key associated with each game. They had used my TrackMania CD key to reset my accounts, but they had also changed the email to their email. So, I sent Nadeo an email asking for help with my password. What they responded with didn’t disappoint.

Folks. All I’m gonna say is, I hope that Nadeo/Ubisoft have upgraded their security since then, and also don’t store passwords in plain text and then also email them to random people who have a CD key of an active licence.

But that got me this persons email. Using that, I found the forum post where they had tried to flog my account. I don’t think I did anything with that information as I had my account back, and what could I really do. Anyway, I could get back to playing TrackMania again.

One of the weirdest bits about my heart surgery is my memory being completely gone for quite a long period of time. From the few hours before my surgery in late August, to about March, my memory is almost completely gone. Amongst that void in my brain is a like, 60 second reel of random moments, each moment getting a length of a couple of seconds down to a single frame. The first cell is just an image of my brother, stood at the end of my bed with his arms crossed. Skip ahead a few frames, it’s my head resting against the toilet roll holder while I’m sat on the loo, because I am struggling to hold myself up. The nurse is the other side of the room watching me be pathetic. 10 seconds later, it’s December. We’re going to a restaurant for the first time in a long while.

I don’t want to make myself sound like a complete weirdo, but I have like a second of “footage” from the hospital. Each frame showing a different unique moment, but it’s all barely in motion. I’m unsure if this a unique brand of mental illness: my memories come back to me as if it was done on a Super 8 camera.

This means I’m missing a lot of stuff. The foggy, undeveloped film in the space between these frames.

It’s a bit weird to be talking about it like this. I used to think I had a really good memory. My memories of growing up are vivid and realistic, and they always have been. I can remember the layout of the houses I’ve lived in since I was 6. Or the first time I rode my bike without stabilisers down our garden without falling over. I remember the first time I saw my wife, sat on a bench outside our sixth form, down to the clothes she was wearing. I used to remember a lot of the times my abusive mother called me a liar, when I knew she was wrong specifically because of that exact same reliable memory. I chose to forget that.

But a lot of that is no longer true. For a while I was struggling to remember the most basic of things. It’s getting better, but it’s no where near as reliable as it used to be. Apparently this is a potential side effect of the bypass I was put on, stopping my soul for 30-45 minutes or so. Besides all the physical horrors you can imagine for having heart surgery, this is by far the worst part of my aortic dissection. I felt like I lost a lot of who I am, because I used to remember a lot of what I experienced every day.

It scares me. I have suddenly aged 40 years in heart and mind in the space of 12 hours being ripped apart in an operating theatre. I’m glad I went back to work a lot earlier than I probably should have, because it’s helped keep my brain occupied with something. Keeping active felt important. Especially in the last few months I want to do nothing but be helpful to people, anyone.

Anyway, this is all to say I had another surgery at the start of June. It was a minor elective surgery, where they cut along the existing scar, removed the sternal wires which kept my ribs together post surgery. For most people, they leave them in, but for me they were causing some complications. Nothing has been that simple for me this last year. The surgeon called me a “tricky customer” a couple weeks ago.

I was in hospital for a week and a half. A longer stay than expected due to my INR. My fellow warfarin heads will know what I mean when I say fuck blood thinners.

This time did provide me space for contemplation on the hospital ward. I got to experience a little slice of what it was like in that dense fog from 10 months ago.

Casting my mind back hard, and trying to think about other patients, the nurses and doctors from 10 months ago, they are mannequins scattered across a blank white room. Faceless and motionless. Their clothes nothing but colourful noise. This time, I got to see many of those same nurses and surgeons with fresh eyes and a sort of functioning memory which helped re-form some of those memories into something a bit more concrete. At least they had a face this time. I took down everyone’s names who I came across onto my iPhone. I will send them a card.

On the day of my surgery, I met a valve replacement patient before theirs. 4-5 days later I saw them again. They were walking around, able to go to the toilet solo, complaining in full sentences and having conversations. After a couple more days they were having a shower. They left the hospital at the same time as me, and were able to walk out looking almost normal. Medicine is amazing, but it shone a light on how fucked I was.

At the end of my initial stay those months ago, I was basically bed bound and unable to do much of anything. My time before heading home was still spent crying in bed, sighing at my life, and by the end of my visit, struggling to play the easy levels of Super Mario 3D Land on my 3DS. Nothing felt easy, not even being alive. And I didn’t get any streetpass hits. We’ve lost so much as a society.

I remember a lot of the feelings I had while in hospital. The awful food. The texture of the teal blanket on your skin. The taste of the frequent teas you get. It feels almost homely to remember that. The warmth of those teas like huddling besides a fire during a cold winter when you were a kid. I don’t know how to feel about that. I suppose it was the first time in my life since childhood, where my life was completely in the care of someone else.

I think I have a problem with nostalgia. Earlier I mentioned that my memories look like an old home movie shot on film. That also gives my memories like a warm feeling. Even the bad memories can be tinted with this weird homely-ness. But it also means I treat my memories as having a sanctity about them. When I think back to playing TrackMania, I remember how much fun I had playing on servers with random people, forgotten connections, and I think that gets in the way of me enjoying things in the today.

TrackMania is unique in that it records all of your times permanently on a server somewhere, which the developer has managed to keep alive for all this time. It means when I boot up that original game from 2006, I get stuck in the menu, looking at the times I had achieved in my memories. All those hours spent driving around on the grass of the stadium. I don’t want to replace those memories with anything new. So I don’t play them. I might drive around a bit in it, explore the track slower than my current record. But I don’t think I have it in me to overwrite those memories, digitally or mentally. I’m finding it too easy to lose memories recently, I don’t want to go out my way to lose more by putting some new ones over my treasured ones at the top of the stack.

I’m sure many others do this as well, but I often just get lost in my memories for hours. When I pick up an object in my house which I haven’t touched in ages, I might have amazingly vivid memories of the last time I touched it. I have hundreds of physical video games, and I could give you memories and stories about all of them.

Unfortunately this doesn’t help me when trying to find where I put the scissors last week, and I have to spend 20 minutes looking for them. But the memories I’ll have of a game, or a book, or a place, or a smell. I could live in those for forever. I kind wish thats what dying was. I also wish I had a way of passing on even a small bit of those memories, like I can pass on my TrackMania times. Maybe thats what this is.

A random thing to end on, but I think a lot about a specific moment from around a month after my surgery. We picked up my dog from a colleague of mine who amazingly looked after her for the whole month, taking an additional worry out of mine and my partners life for a bit. His face seeing me for that first time after opening the door will stay with me as one of those snapshots. It made me reconsider all the faces I’ve made over my life at elderly relatives as they reach the end of their lives.

I am going to have to practice that in the mirror.