Spotty Photographic Memory

I remember this circus act when I was a kid. The motorcycle was on a high wire, directly over me. The sound was enormous, the stench of fuel laden exhaust, and off it went across the high wire.

There was a cage built around the cable such that if the acrobat lost it, the motorcycle itself would dangle from the wire rather than crashing onto the spectators below.

It would be an unremarkable memory except for how early it is. When I was telling my mother about it, she remembered the circus but didn't think I could, because she wasn't even pregnanat with my kid brother at the time. Which means I wasn't even two years old.

18 month olds don't remember shit, right? So I've been lead to believe my whole life, but here I am with a vivid memory of what was likely Michealangelo Nock or a Bauer brother doing a motorcycle high wire act in 1971.

There was also candy. In my dad's desk at the bottom of the stairs in a house we lived in until I was five. It was a caboose made of hard licorice with a small toffee hammer for breaking off pieces of the candy. My mom doesn't remember it but my dad does, it was an ad specialty left over from when he tried to sell farm supplies on commission.

Again, a powerful memory of something incredibly stimulating. I would have been a toddler in all likelihood, and knowing there was a secret stash of candy in Dad's desk would have been high octane information with a powerful, random positive reinforcement that on occassion Dad would let me break off a piece of that candy.

And hard candy licorice is intense. It's a polarizing candy, part of why I have to special order the shit off Amazon because it's almost non-existent on store shelves. I don't mean ropes, 99% of what is sold as "licorice" doesn't taste anything like the real thing, I'm talking lump of coal black, hard candy with that intense anise/licorice flavor and aroma. It's borderline medicinal.

I don't even know if I like the stuff so much as I just have really positive memories associated with that taste and texture. When I think about it, licorice is nasty shit. An acquired taste? Perhaps, but if there is such a thing I acquire tastes almost instantly. Unfortunately that extends to things like spirits, I never didn't find whiskey an agreeable experience, see also gin, tequila, everything except vodka. The alcohol alone wasn't appealing until I was fully addicted to booze, at that point I'd trink 100 proof McCormick vodka straight if that was what was available.

I think this explains a lot about me (not my alcoholism, though it accounts for that in a way). I never thought of myself as having anything resembling PTSD, but I think it's because my memory is so specifically spotty. I remember intense experiences with a borderline photographic memory, but that memory is spotty at best because mundane experiences are barely recorded at all. Like, it borders on dementia symptoms and it's not new.

It's a lot of what fuels my writing, if you were memorable I just about can't forget you. Which means you were exceptionally kind, possibly. Generosity is remembered but cruelty is too. My childhood couldn't possibly have been the string of pure rejection punctuated with occasional ecstatic joy that my memory would indicate.

Which, in writing fiction, I default to changing the names of the real people who inspire the narrative. I'm not as autobiographical in my focus as David Sedaris, but to me he is more of a fiction writer than anything else. Creative biography, and it has alienated some of his family because they didn't sign up to be lampooned and caricatured.

Most fiction is just biography/autobiography in disguise. You change names and places, even set the story years in the future or the past, and of course you refine. Never let facts get in the way of a good story, and of course anything can be allegory.