Media and Memory

I ran my first ever 10K this week, and despite coming in third out of four runners, my time was still faster than anyone else on the team (not as impressive as it sounds, since very few people will willingly submit themselves to running twenty five laps around an oval). Halfway through I started overheating in my under-armor, which I had on under my singlet, so I spent about 200 meters of the race topless as I tried to get my singlet back on without breaking my pace. It slowed me down a good bit, and would have gotten me disqualified at a more strict race, but it was an inspiring and unique experience to hear my team chant “Strip! Strip! Strip!” as I did the last thirteen laps.

On the bus ride home I spent more time staring pensively out the window at the blank Iowan landscape than anyone who wants to retain their sanity should, and I thought about how I’d remember this day years from now. Sure, the strip-chanting and sore legs and vibrant blue of the track will all come up. But I’m sure that I won’t be able to locate the point in time without the Ben Folds songs I’ve been listening to recently (“Annie Waits” and “The Ascent of Stan”) playing in the back of my mind, or the young adult novel manuscript written by a friend I read after the race interweaving with my own story, or the bizarre anime I made the mistake of watching the night before filling the memory with fighting robots and freudian imagery.

I know that’s the way I’ll remember it because it’s happened before. On my last run of my high school career I tripped on a root and broke my wrist on a route that my coach had always warned me was hazardous, but that I’d run hundreds of times. Pretty good anecdote, right? The kind you’d think would be memorable in its own right. But I can never remember the aching in my wrist on its own, it’s always tied up with the book I read (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), the movie I watched (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) the video game I played (Undertale), and how the ache felt through all those experiences. My first experience with interpersonal high school drama is inseparable from the memories of reading God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, playing Paper Mario, and listening to “City With No Children in it” by Arcade Fire, all of which worked to distract me from the drama in the short run but also means that now I can’t read, play, or listen to any of those without painful memories rising to the surface (though honestly, that’s no worse than the surface meaning of God Bless You Mr. Rosewater or “City With No Children in it”). 

This connection goes back as early as I can remember. In my post Waco Pride I said that one of my fondest memories was playing with my friend Emily in the park around the Waco suspension bridge. But even that is inseparable from Wilco’s “Shot in the Arm” and “I’m Always in Love,” which my dad played in the car on the way back from one of our play dates. Even my earliest memory is embedded in media: playing the Mata Nui Online Game on a computer so slow that in the time it took between computer screens my brother would read me four or five Shel Silverstein poems.

The connection between media and life is probably obvious and harmless to most people, and usually it is to me too. But sometimes it strikes me as deeply disturbing. When even our most essential memories are built around books and movies and video games and music, all made by people we’ve never known, then what do we have left that’s real? How far are we from the dystopia (that really isn’t played up for horror nearly as much as it should be) of Ready Player One, where the only worlds that matters is one made by people who died before we were born?

Of course, I’m being overdramatic. There’s nothing new about remembering, understanding, and living our lives through creations of others. But now that anyone with internet can access more content than they can consume in a lifetime instantly, I think there’s a danger of media overtaking life. Fittingly, I think the perfect balance to strive for is illustrated in the media, in TV shows like Freaks and Geeks and books like High Fidelity. For those characters, movies and music aren’t ends in and of themselves, but ways to define themselves and connect with others. Media doesn’t replace life, it facilitates it.

Maybe the best example of this comes from reading my friend's manuscript this weekend. The plot, the characters, and the writing style were all clearly influenced by young adult novels like The Hunger Games trilogy and the Harry Potter series. But she reconfigured those familiar elements into something unique, something distinctively hers. Borrowing the language of people she’d never met, she made something deeply personal. And that’s something I’ll be proud to use as a landmark in time when I want to remember stripping in the middle of a 10K.