Who Else Browned Out for 22 Years?

Today's topic is a phenomenon that frightened me for a long time until I discovered it may be far more common than I originally thought.

For the uninitiated, there is an especially great episode of Always Sunny titled "Who Got Dee Pregnant?" I use the word "especially" since every episode of The GOAT TV comedy is by definition great. This one especially so for many reasons, not the least of which is the first time I heard the phrase "brown out". The guys are arguing about which of them got Dee pregnant at a Halloween party. Mac explains he can't quite remember because he "browned out", i.e...drank so much that he didn't quite black out, but only remembers bits and pieces. Got it? Got it.

I browned out for the first 22 years of my life. But unlike Mac, alcohol can only be partially blamed. Basically, everything that happened in my life before I moved into the post-college house feels somewhere along the spectrum of that movie you're unsure if you ever saw, that dream you can't quite remember, or that conversation you know you had but weren't really paying attention to.

I used to think this was a problem unique to my own set of donkey brains. After talking to tons of people my age, maybe I'm not so alone. But why? Is this common? We're not here to definitively answer those questions, but for posterity, let's play it safe and blame the internet, social media, and cell phones like always. They changed the way millennials were exposed to information and our brains weren't trained on how to process it all, so we forget things. Quite a cop-out, I know, but the discrepancy between generations is odd. Go watch a Holocaust or Michael Jackson documentary and notice how these fuckers remember shit in DETAIL. Those are obviously dark examples and could be explained because they were such monumental moments, but there's more. When I go home for the holidays, my Dad and I usually meet up at a bar with a bunch of his old buddies. They laugh and drink beer and tell stories from high school and college like they happened yesterday. Some of them even venture into middle school territory. Many stories involve old neighbors, teachers, or long-gone classmates. Conversely, I can't even remember the name of ONE teacher I had in college. Not one. I could probably rattle off 5 names maximum from elementary through high school, and that's only because I had a crush on one of them (Ms Gravina...sup), and the others had very identifiable characteristics like a baseball coach or major weirdo. Doesn't that seem problematic? I never had my own Edward James Olmos, so the significance of forgetting teacher names may be smaller than I'm making it out to be. Still, I think it underlines the general blur of a time period that should still be somewhat fresh in my mind.

The brown-ness of certain periods vary in shade. I like to classify them in three (3) ways, obviously leaving out Ages 0-6 because there's only one Yoko Ono (seriously, what an asshole she is). Let's review below:

1. The Fugue State - Age 6 - 11: Early in Breaking Bad, teacher-turned-meth-cook Walter White goes out into the desert to cook a batch. His trailer/meth lab stalls out and he has to account for being missing for like 4 days. He pulls a genius move by stripping naked and wandering through a grocery store, claiming it was a "Fugue State" as a result of his cancer. He doesn't remember anything. Long story short, his wife and doctors buy this excuse (for a while, anyway). Little Gooey could very well could have been pissing on the produce section as a 10 year old. I got basically nothing from this age. For all I know, I was adopted away from the parents from Matilda at Age 8. In all sincerity, I think my first human memory was the OJ Car Chase, and I would have been almost 6. I remember nothing other than it was happening on the TV. Other than that, I'm told I played plenty of baseball and soccer, and went to school. The when/where/why/how is black. Fugue State.

2. The Mandela Effect - Age 12 - 16: The Mandela effect is basically when a large group of people remember something in way that it didn't actually happen. The linked clip is pretty cool and the topic is worth an entire blog some day. A famous example is Darth Vader actually saying "No, I am your Father", NOT "Luke, I am your father." Anyway, that's this time frame. I know things happened, but I'd be an incredibly unreliable witness. Johnnie Cochran would turn me into Swiss Cheese with the amount of holes he could poke in my story. If you tell me something happened a certain way, I'll remember it that way. Huge chunks missing. The time frame most closely resembles the actual concept of the "brown-out" as it pertains to drinking. This is particularly a DAMN SHAME, as middle school was the pinnacle of my athletic career (not at all a pathetic thing for a 31 year old to say). The storage room at my parent's home is full of cheap trophies from baseball tournaments I have almost no recollection of winning unless I look at the pictures. Highlights: I know I was excited to get my driver's license. I kissed a couple girls (NBD). The acne fiasco began. That's about it.

3. The Vivid Dream - Age 17 - 22: This one is pretty self-explanatory. The memories from this time frame aren't as hazy as that dream you completely forget about 6 seconds after hopping in the shower, but the dream you're still thinking about at lunchtime and weeks later. You have most of the pieces but they don't seem quite real. It's almost like you were watching your life from another person's point of view. Like a dream, many of the things you do remember cause you to ask yourself things like: "Why the fuck did I think that was normal? Did I not realize something strange was happening? Did I not realize I looked like an idiot?" All the details might not be there, but if someone reminds you of something, you at least have a vague recollection of it. Admittedly, most of this logic applies to high school and freshman-sophomore year of college. Things started to clear up a little more junior/senior year, but the actual experience of going to class, studying, and college parties is such a bizarre and distant concept to a guy in my stage of life that I have to keep the experience in it's entirety within the Vivid Dream stage. This is perhaps more of a coping mechanism than anything.

After Age 22 things come into focus. Let's not get it twisted - I have still lost and will continue to lose more than my fair share of memories past that age, but can chalk almost all of it up to booze. At the very least, the person in that time frame is recognizable to me today - I'm 99% sure I was there and lived it. Anything before that is up for grabs, subject to the whims of parents and friends who's word I'm forced to trust. It's probably better that way.