Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes. Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010.
I’m currently battling a pretty nasty cold. In fact the last two days have been spent floating through a thick fog, punctuated by a few minutes of clarity as medicines kick in and push away the nasty haze. So, the ability to remember enough of 2010 right now to give my future amnesiac self some sort of insight into it seems, well, beyond me.
The first time I woke up this morning and read the prompt (some time around 1:30 AM), I actually tossed my phone with the email to the other side of my bed and said, “GO AWAY NOISY BIRD.” If that had been the five minutes I had to record 2010 for my own posterity, then I probably wouldn’t have any memories of this year left.
A few hours later, angry and frustrated about the little beeping thing I couldn’t seem to find, I pulled myself out of bed abnormally early and began searching around my room for the annoyance that kept me from finishing my dream about an anthropomorphic hot dog going to high school. I’m not sure where all of that came from, I’m blaming a potential fever, but its here now, in case Disney continues to mine my brain for clever ideas. I moved from my bed to my office chair, and stared my monitor into submission. That takes about 20 minutes, you know. There was that email again from Reverb10, taunting me, as if I should be able to remember more than a few minutes ago anyway.
This time, I ran and hid in the shower.
After the steam of the shower, and various pharmaceutical chemicals, my head began to clear up enough for me to think, and all it wanted to do was keep thinking about what it would write down in five minutes about 2010. Things like:
“Matt,
Don’t be alarmed, I am you, writing you this letter so that you can understand what exactly has happened to you. See, in a bid to save the universe from super powered aliens, you had to voluntarily have your mind wiped clean of the last year, yeah, like the plot to [amazon_link id=”B0001NBNDY” target=”_blank” ]Paycheck[/amazon_link]. Now, we don’t have much time to recant all of the details of our year, so I think its best I just give you the cliffnotes version.
1) You have new Roommates
2) You have a new car
3) Don’t forget that you are better off, now. Trust me.
4) You actually survived February this year without any problems. Keep an eye out in 2011, but it looks like the curse is over.
5) You invented anthropomorphic teenage hotdog character. Sue Disney if they steal it… there is proof on the internet.
6) Oh yeah, you finally got off your ass and started contributing…”
AND TIME!
Ok. I’m not great at the thinking under pressure, and there were probably a lot more important things I should have told myself, but, 5 minutes is 5 minutes, and I didn’t want to cheat.
Maybe I should have convinced myself that I was way cooler, like, I jumped the grand canyon on a motorcycle or something.
No, instead, I wasted some of my time drawing an MS-Paint image of an emo hotdog.