Meandering in My Own Head

They say that time catches up with all of us. It has with me. Some days I am so muzzy-headed that I wonder whether I will remember much of that day and on others, I am clear-minded and on top of things. Such is the decay that comes to a person who does not pay attention to the passage of time on a regular basis. But it is irritatingly distracting to be in a body that looks back at you in the mirror and does not scream "old fart" but whose mind kind of does.

The meandering mind that recalls snippets of songs from a half-century or more ago can't remember who the band was who performed the song "Closing Time" without Googling. By the way, it was Semisonic and it was released in 1998. The meandering mind can recall foods like "Shake-a-Pudding", but can't always recall dinner from the night before (for the record, it was a salad with home-grown lettuce and Geno's Deep Dish pizza with added chicken sausage and mushrooms. The meandering mind remembers the name of the band my brother and I formed and named after a model dune buggy called SandKat, but can't recall the student I met with last Thursday.

I know that for some of you, this is also your life and you struggle for a word here or there and other equally irritating mind "farts" of factoids that your younger mind would have rapidly recalled. I know you feel what I am feeling in your own way. For me, the struggle is with adapting to my lesser facile mind while still recognizing that I have a better than average operating system and it is doing the processing for other much more needs than the many things I have previously recalled. But still...

Then I wonder, where do the old ideas go, if they don't seem to be in my brain anywhere. Perhaps there is a place in the cosmos where all the lost thoughts are stored. Perhaps, these are where dreams are fabricated--out of recycled old thoughts from others. Maybe that is why our dreams strike us as so odd? They literally are not our ideas at all or perhaps some pieces are, but others aren't? 

Imagine that parking lot of lost ideas. Ideas that are thousands of years old, in languages we don't speak and may not exist anymore. Imagine if these ideas were actually towed from your brain and someday we get a summons in the mail to pick them up and/or pay some kind of fine for forgetting them,