The Archivist

There are so many things that we have to remember,
and too little time to be archivists.
Son, father, husband, lover.
Citizen, teacher, intergalatic space warrior.
Am I a drinker, a smoker, a cocaine user?
or a show-off, a bull-shitter, a winner, or a loser?
Life is so short; you should do what makes you happy,
yet life is so long; realizing happniess is after the fact.
Happiness is remembering and forgetting
and memory is a light-saber and the force.

Some people use photographs to remember;
they document, organize, and place in a binder,
and forget that life is experiencing the moment.
Some people use religion as their muse,
as if God collected our memories and bound them to prose;
a sacred scrapbook--a collection of souless memories of a past that no one remembers--
to remind them of a lackluster utilitarian tableau.
Some people try to remember by forgetting.
Escapism, selective amnesia, blockages of the mind.
We all indulge in this dishonesty of forgetting, but we claim that we are honest.
Memory is not the flux capacitor of honesty but of happiness.

We are time travelers seeking to recapture our dignity.
Jumping back and forth, back and forth, back and forth;
the time lag distorts our senility,
until all we have left are cobwebs of what used to be our experiences.
So we remember; we rebuild our present.
Our mental archives are censored, revised and reorganized,
and the archivist constructs a new reality
and congratulates herself on her honesty of organizing dignity.

I will kill you with my memories.
I will dominate you, humiliate you, and destroy you with memory.
I am the archivist and I wield my light saber,
with a force that is accurate, sarcastic, and sublime.
But I do not follow the dark side;
My emotions do not power my memory.
My memories are researched and organized.
You will simply be rewritten and then forgotten.
The archivist's job is finally completed--a simple deletion.