The cringe lasts forever

The older I get, the more I forget a lot of very basic things things. I recently had a lot of trouble remembering the address of a house I lived in for a whole year in the late 2000s. I couldn't even find the fucking thing on a map, until a friend helped me out. And if you asked me what I had for dinner two nights ago, you'd get the mother of all blank stares.

But the stupid shit I said and did when I was a whole lot younger lingers in the head forever. The cringe never fades, no matter how old and senile I'm getting.

The mid-90s are a bit of a haze - after moving out of home, I was getting blazed every day and shitfaced drunk three times a week. I hold onto memories through the places I lived in, the jobs I had and the endless pop culture I consumed at the time, but there are entire months there that are just a blur of young foolishness.

And yet, I can't forget so much of the embarrassing bullshit I spouted at the time. And there was a lot of it - nobody else has an opinion quite like somebody in their early twenties, an equal measure of certainty and utter obliviousness.  

The stupid things I remember so well weren't hurtful or mean, thank goodness. They were just dumb shit that made me look stupid. But I remember them all, man.

All the times I foisted my dumb theories about the dumbest movies on my poor friends and family, who really didn't give a shit about Hammer horror movies, but still listened patiently to 30-minute lectures on how they were the great movie studios. All the times I made some dumb Monty Python or Withnail and I quote while chatting up a girl in the nightclubs, and seeing their eyes justifiably glaze over.

I'd only seen one Fellini film and still had all the opinions in the world about the filmmaker, along with a desperate need to share them with many uninterested parties. I'd get stupid drunk after work on a Friday and blub to my flatmates about seeing that same cloud from The Invisibles in Queenstown. 

Fucking hell, what a wanker.

And then I was going online, saying the most enormous bullshit, and can still recall with devastating clarity the absolutely awful timing of a Radiohead lyric that I posted in a SOI Hyperchat room in 1997, or the time Gail Simone put me in my place after another ill-timed joke in the CBR chat.

In this regard, I feel sorry for kids today -  by which I consider anyone under the age of 40 - and the way you poor bastards have had to deal with this shit at that age, the internet was only just getting stuck into cultuer at that time, and thank goodness digital stuff doesn't last.

Because we're all young and dumb once, and say the stupidest shit, and that shit clings to your brain forever.