Ahhh, the memories of youth

My memory is some what shitty. I think back to high school, and I really cannot remember much of it. I draw upon my high school hockey memory bank and the only things I remember are the times I utterly embarrassed myself (it was only twice, I swear), or did something halfway decent (e.g. my first goal, and . . . uhhh, there was uh, that time I got a penalty for kicking some kid's stick into the neutral zone (total bullshit by the way)).

Going back further is even more fruitless. Maybe not. I just surprised myself by remembering the names of my K-5 teachers. But with the exception of the time we went to the Mall to show the community how we learned in fifth grade (oh and the time I failed a math quiz because I was so ingrained with the subtraction process that I could not do 15-7 without crossing out the one and carrying it over, even though it resulted in a mirror image of the question. . . live and learn you know) elementary school is a blur. We could try talking about college, but as my IL bar app. proved, I could not even remember which professors taught which class.

Hell, I cannot even remember what I had for lunch two days ago. I could probably make an educated guess based on the food in my pantry, but by no means would I make a wager on it.

So then, the other day, one of my friends had a picture appear on one of those social networking sites. It was a picture of him and President Clinton shaking hands. And in the deep recesses of memory, I pulled out a nugget of knowledge that had long been dormant.

Back in Clinton's first term, when I was about 13 years old, I began to have these things called hormones raging through my body. I eventually learned that the only to prevent myself from walking around with an erection all day was to make it spit every now and then. As luck would have it, my father also had a Playboy subscription at the time and chose to store his Playboy's in his chest of drawers. As was my wont at the time, I would occasionally borrow the magazine and take care of business; generally between the hours of 3 and 5, when I was home but my folks were not. Ahhh, I have fond memories of Drew Barrymore's pictorial (link is wikipedia proof, not actually pictures).

But at some point during this time frame of stealthily pilfering my pop's mags, I would get bored and read the articles. And one of these Playboy's was a few pages on the year in sex (1994? I would guess that, it was probably in the same issue as Drew's pictorial. Needless to say, that was my favorite one). Included among Anna Nicole marrying that old oil guy and Elle Macpherson doing something fucking hot and the cast of Seinfeld in bed with the sheets pulled up to their necks was an innocuous photo of President Clinton shaking hands with some dame. Included was the quote (as near as I can remember) "Shaking hands with the President is a full body sexual experience."

So when I saw my friend shaking the hand of Mr. Clinton, the memory of that singular passage came back, I immediately Googled it, found a reference, and laid a solid gold comment on the picture.

Then I got to thinking about this. I read that 13 years ago. Right now, I am really trying to remember what I did last week, and am mostly shooting blanks.

Memory is a funny thing. But I am confident when there is something that I need to know at one particular moment of my existence, I will be able to recall it. That has to be why I do so well on exams, yet constantly forget to call people back.