Your Memory is Full

I take a lot of crappy cell phone pictures. Because I take so many, I am constantly maxing out the phone's internal memory, necessitating a purge of the old and infirm. It seems unfair, but such is life. Better to learn the tough lessons when you're still young and can store 'em deep within your rubbery, toddler bones.



Pictures that I have already used (usually to drive up page views/make art) get the boot. Everything else stays. Even if I can't tell what the picture is of, or for what purpose it was taken, I keep it. You never know when months later you'll have an A-HA! moment and realize that the reason you kept this picture around for so long was because the subject -- a pretzel with mustard on it -- sort of looks like an old man with a five o'clock shadow and a big nose complaining about the lack of fresh tomatoes this time of year

Today, while performing one of the ritualistic cleansing ceremonies necessary to make room for newer, blurrier sources of pixilated joy, I decided to work some photoshop magic on a picture that had baffled me for quite some time. It was practically black, but I knew, for some reason, that there was something hidden beneath its seemingly opaque surface worth holding onto. My brain didn't bother to store the information of what it was, it just tagged it as, "possibly pretty great." Good enough for me. I trust my brain in situations like these. In order to make it readable I had to turn it into something of an Olde Timey Photographe, but don't be fooled, this is 100% contemporary and 100% legit:

You might still have trouble reading it (I don't know how this will look on every single monitor configuration) so let me help you out. It says, in large lettering across the top of a windowed storefront, "Bubble Builders," and underneath that it reads, "Your Neighborhood Contractor."

Oh, to have a pristine memory capable of remembering the context of this photo!

I'm fairly certain that this is not a joke, because, to the best of my knowledge, I have not been on any television or internet video sets recently. I freely admit that I have only retained about 4% of the memory of the circumstances surrounding the taking of this photograph, but my brain tells me that it's quite sure I walked by this on the street, possibly in Park Slope that one time my girlfriend and I trekked over there (a full 5 subway stops) to go to a Korean place that has bomb-ass bibimbap. Again, good enough for me. If my brain says it's real, it's real.

But I need to know more. Is this a piece of performance art? Is it an accidental picture of one of my dreams? Is it something Charlie Kauffman thought of for half a second while he was on the toilet, appearing suddenly and inexplicably during the taking of a mental inventory of items he needed to purchase from the super market, weaving its way through the realization that he was out of shallots like a needle and thread intermittently breaching the surface of a massive tropical fish costume being sewn for the chronically shy child of a domestically oriented/overprotective mother, only vaguely and fleetingly being acknowledged by its ostensible creator?

I want to know. I want you to tell me.



Won't you help me? Won't you help me understand?



How come I remember so much about the bimimbap that may or may not have been consumed on the night this picture was taken, but I remember so little about the picture itself?

It doesn't seem fair.

Seriously though, if you ever have a chance to eat bibimbap out of one of those cast iron bowls that they make table-side guacomole in, take it. It keeps the dish hot the whole time and crustifies the bottom layer of rice fantastically. Have you ever had really crispy rice? It's a true delight.

And oh yeah, here's a picture of a cat that stands silently at the end of the hallway where my apartment is located. I call him/her (I haven't ascertained its gender... yet) Kubrick Kat.