The persistence of memory

One of the really wonderful things I've been able to do my entire life is remember most of the things I've done wrong. This is precisely the opposite of what positive thinkers say: That the key to success is a bad memory. And it's not so much a matter of learning from mistakes as the reliving of them time and again, making it nearly impossible to do anything new unless you shut the memory off. Thus I remember bombing at a talent show in ninth grade with a stand-up act, as if that matters to anyone in the entire universe or has any bearing at all on my life now. Or throwing pebbles at a car when I was 4 and getting yelled at by the people driving. Or not having the guts to throw a friend out of an apartment when she crashed on our couch WAY too long; Or getting turned down for a date by someone I have never seen since and who was utterly wrong for me. On the other hand, I do remember a lot of good things too, a lot of which have to do with Garden City. Anyway, for this blog I want to avoid the bad stuff and write about the good stuff.