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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #120 (Memories)

Published over 1 year ago • 7 min read

1 Family Photo:
Making Memories

The mere act of remembering changes our memories.

We carry memories of our past selves, but our past selves also carry on as memories in the minds of others.

So which is closer to the objective truth: our own past memories, or the collective memories the people we've interacted with have of us? Maybe there's a weighted average of those memories—your best friend's memories of you should probably count more than those of some stranger who checked out behind you at the grocery store.

--

A memory I'd like to share:

Before I do, there's something important you need to know: volleyball is very much a vibe sport. Obviously it helps to be taller, but if two teams are roughly the same size, the one with the better vibes will win. There's science to back this up: teams that touch each other more win more often, coaching timeouts are effectively used to break up the other team's momentum or pull one's own team out of a funk, "flow state" is a term that's transitioned from woo-woo mysticism to psychological science.

Anyways, vibes are a big part of volleyball. And volleyball players use the time between points to encourage and hype each other up.

When I was a senior, my high school volleyball team drove 2 hours south to play a big volleyball game in Santa Barbara. Volleyball is a niche sport, but it's big deal in Santa Barbara. Something about the city's location on the beach and its weather makes it a magnet for long bodies that can jump really high. As our team entered the gym and saw the home team's warmups - setters lofting balls high into the air, hitters launching themselves above the nets, balls blasting straight down into the floor on the other side - it was clear we were the underdogs.

So we started the five-game match, and our team played well at the start. I think we split the first two games and won the third. The vibes were good. We opened the fourth game strong, but then something felt off in the middle. We made a few careless errors. We lost a few points in a row. The vibes shifted. I don't know why—maybe we didn't touch each other enough or didn't call a timeout at the right time.

Another digression: that year, our setter Kenny and I were in the same statistics class. At the time, we were going through a unit which was probably described in a teaching syllabus as "Experiential Exploration of Randomness and Probability". Our classroom of high school seniors, a few short months from graduation, played dice for weeks—mostly Yahtzee, but also Craps and some Farkle.

So between points, as we were getting ready to receive the serve, Kenny tried to hype me up saying: "This first set is coming to you—I didn't get lucky at dice today, so we're due for some luck now." (editor's note: this is not an appropriate application of randomness and probability.)

We received the serve, the pass went perfectly to Kenny, Kenny set it me, and I leapt to meet the ball above the net. The net was wide open, nobody on the other team was there to contest my shot. I crushed the ball.

As I made contact, I yelled out: "YAHTZEE!"

But the moment I made contact, suddenly the net was no longer empty. Two massive hands appeared the other side of the net. Two massive arms stretched over the net and blocked my shot back to the ground on our side of the court.

Maybe the net was never actually open. I don't know.

​

I don't remember how the game or the match turned out, but I know we lost that point.

The memory is just a moment in time. I'd probably have forgotten it too except that summer I stayed in Santa Barbara with my aunt and uncle. One weekend, I went down to East Beach to see if I could play a bit of volleyball. Some high school freshmen were there, talking about trying to make the varsity team the next year.

In the middle of playing, one of them shouted out: "YAHTZEE!"

"Did you say Yahtzee?" I asked after the point. "Why do you say that?"
"I don't know," he said. "It's just something we say here after someone makes a big block."

--

This week is the end of summer vacation.

Luana and I spent the last two weeks taking trips and making memories with the kids. I don't know how we'll remember them or how they'll be remembered. I hope we all look back on them fondly. I hope we can take trips and make memories as long as Calvin and Lawrence want to keep doing that with us.

Maybe longer.

1 Dad Joke:
Remember Me Well

I'm considering a glass coffin.
Remains to be seen.

I've trained a custom GPT, Dad[AI]Base, to create images for these jokes.

Below is a screenshot of our dialogue to create the image above:

I've created a monster.

Highlights:
Memories

​My mother, who I have made in paper by Freddie deBoer​

My memories of you are paper-thin fables, at this point, legends passed down through generations, the oral histories of an ancient people. I think back to the stories I told when I could remember them, and now I remember only the remembering, and that not well. Once you showed me how to press butcher paper against a gravestone and rub it with a crayon to create a facsimile of a marker of what once was alive, and such are my memories of you.
...
And yet I know things about you, I know them by heart. I know you to be lithe, antsy, easy to grab hold of. You ambled along in life, both purposeful and relaxed, like a cat padding unhurried across a roof. Famously kind, famously stubborn, famously hotheaded. At your funeral a friend described how you told her, right after her infant died, that she would go right out and get pregnant again, and her great anger at you for saying so. “Presumptuous woman!” she said, meaning you and your thoughtless sunniness, your ebullient and clumsy light. “And she was right” was the next part of her story, for that was what she needed to hear and to do and that was what she did.
...
Mothers, this is your gift, your glory. For now you exist to your children in all of your fleshy corporeality; you are a body first, and it is from your literal bosom that comfort springs. In time they will wander farther and farther away from your physical embrace, but you will always be their embodiment of safety and warmth, and it is that ideal which will inevitably recede away from them, the inescapable loss that we name maturity or adulthood in the vain hope of rendering it bearable. We live in the shadow of our longing for you. Yours is the call we hear, insistent and indistinct, on every spare breeze that passes softly through our windows.

​Limelight by Leslie Kendall Dye​

Ten seconds strikes me these days as a profound unit of time, because it is this length of time that my mother’s memory lasts.
​
If you have a conversation with my mother, you have just about ten seconds to impart the narrative thrust. Then the clock is reset, the board is wiped clean, and you must begin again.
​
Ten seconds is not a very long time. Ten seconds does not seem like a “real” amount of time. What can be achieved in ten seconds? Ten seconds is the foam on the beer, the last bit of crust on the pizza, the dregs in your coffee cup. It is a trifle, a thing that we throw away all day and all the time. It is the time I stand on the bath mat drying off after a shower, the time I spend signing my child’s homework before it goes back with her to school, the time it takes to order an iced tea at the local cafe before I pick her up at the end of the day. Nothing big can happen in ten seconds; ten seconds is a bridge of time between events, the space between lily pads that we jump—that we pass over—to get to the next one.
...
Except sometimes we do, we do notice one, like catching a child’s bubble on the wind before it pops. I noticed one universe on Sunday, as I walked in the light of early fall, with my mother and my child. I noticed it precisely because it was gossamer thin and I feared losing it. Because of it, those ten seconds formed an eternal memory. Ten seconds will now last forever. Ten seconds is a long time, and a long space too.
​
We can travel quite far in ten seconds, we can live the length of an entire play. I greet my mother and hug her, then offer her tea. Ten seconds. We listen to a lyric from a song. Ten seconds. We buy flowers and they provide rapture and heartache. Ten seconds. Of these spans, we make not one universe, but many. We do not need the last universe to inform the next one. True, when we can mentally connect the multitudes of universes we form each day, that chain offers the security of continuity. But if we lack the mental ability to connect the bubbles, my mother proves that we can still live fully in each one before it pops.

​Go gentle into that good night by Roger Ebert (2009)​

I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

​Stanford's War on Social Life by Ginevra Davis​

One of my first memories at Stanford, in the fall of 2018, was walking down the Row with a sophomore friend. We walked by a charming yellow house, a Greek-style manor with a lawn perfect for beer pong. I told him that I had just been to a party there, at the yellow house called “550.”
​
“Don’t call it 550,” he snapped.
“What?”
“It’s not 550. It’s Sig Chi. They tried to scrape the crest off but you can still see it.”
​
He pointed, and I did see it: a faded black square a few feet above the doorway. “This is their plan, you know,” my friend continued. “I feel bad for you guys.”

iamJoshKnox Highlight:

​Memento Memoriam | iamJoshKnox​

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Until next week,
​iamJoshKnox​​

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Josh Knox

Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇

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