BLAM: From Supercomputer To Filing Cabinets
The impact of TBI on a gifted mind
How do I help you understand
what it feels like?
If you don’t KNOW…
you can’t know.
But I can take you other places.
Show you other things.
All aboard!
THE DOWNGRADE
Check it: You are twenty-eight years old today. More specifically, you are twenty-eight years and three days old. For your entire existence on this planet, you have run your life and done your things and played and worked and earned a living on the most efficient, new-fangled, bells-n-whistles, powerhouse supercomputer!1
You kinda won the lottery with this thing.
Honestly? You have no clue what you were born with. I mean, it’s the only brain you know, right? So you don’t reeeeally understand.
But you’re about to.
You—being the insatiable learner and overachiever that you are—have cultivated this gift anyway, upgrading it with all sorts of programs like Voracious Reading, Obsessive Athleticism, Obscure Rabbit Holes, Artist Suite Pro, Collegiate Degrees, Rosetta Stone, Office Management XP, Plate Spinning: Maximum Effort, and Hoop Juggler—Turbo. (That’s the flaming hoop version, for those of you who have never installed that program. It also teaches you to launch your ridiculous ass from a cannon and dive through said flaming hoops wearing a sparkly LED-lit onesie and an even sparklier smile.)
The amount of time, resources, and energy you have devoted to upgrading this fancy-dancey supercomputer would make all your plates spin straight off your cute little sticks if you took the time to analyze it.
Which you will.
Because late one night, you decide to take the freeway home instead of your sedate, sneaky back-route that avoids rush hour traffic on I-25. Eh. It’s the middle of the night and there’s hardly anybody out here, so you hop onto the entrance ramp in an impulsive, split-millisecond decision.
(Because all your mental processes happen at split-milliseconds around here. They often happen too quickly for anybody’s good, especially when the amount of data you process is layered to the 999th degree, which is why it takes you so long to sort your shit, but you don’t realize that yet because it’s just your shit and it’s just your supercomputer and it’s all you’ve ever known.)
As you approach your exit, you breathe easily, because you’re almost home where you can unplug from the world and recharge in the quiet of your safety-nest. Alas. A drunk driver blasts through your bumper and downgrades you into a basement storage facility.
Not your basement.
Nope.
This is some creepy, nasty basement in somebody else’s dilapidated house. One swinging lightbulb. A rickety staircase any B-horror-movie director would salivate over. It’s creaky. A little too steep to comfortably walk down. At least there’s a railing you can lean on. Just don’t lean too hard as you carry your everything—
Excuse me.
As you carry everything you’ve been left with downstairs because your streamlined computer with its monster processor, oversize hard drive, and gobs of storage has been swiped.
Nah.
You can potentially find something that’s been swiped.
This is obliteration. Smashed that sucker beneath squealing tires on black pavement just after midnight on Winter Solstice. Everything that could be salvaged was poofed into paper and shoved into musty cardboard boxes that you now get to carry down into that basement by hand.
Night after night after night…
Joyous of joys!
Tonight’s box got left out in the rain. It’s waterlogged. About to come apart. You keep having to bolster up the load with your knee because you’re very afraid that the bottom is about to give way and explode today’s load of paper and keepsakes all across the staircase.
You pick your way tentatively down those skreeky stairs, one foot-patting step after another, into the murk. Smells like dust and mold down there. You’d like to say it’s not your dust. Not your mold, but after three years of this?
Yeah. It is.
Well…now it’s also yours.
You make this trip every night to tuck away the day’s doings into the nose-high filing cabinets that live there. Row after row after row of them. They’re all painted in that washed-out goldenrod that was popular in the 70s. Or maybe the gold was vibrant once, but time has had its way.
You wonder, on an oddball day, how the cabinets got so washed out when there’s no sunlight down here. There are a few tiny windows just beneath the wooden slats of the ceiling (up there where you don’t look anymore, because you don’t wanna know how much of that is the infiltrating root system from nearby trees and how much is spiderweb). The glass of the windows was broken before you got here and they’ve been boarded up, so all you have is the one lightbulb near the stairs.
When you reach the bottom, you start a pan-n-scan using that forehead flashlight you’ve learned to cinch on by its elasticized band, so you can hunt for the necessary filing cabinets hands-free.
You know these cabinets are an inefficient system. You remember the SEARCH feature of your old supercomputer, how it had folders and subfolders and entire programs dedicated to specific kinds of data. High-quality data.
Audio recordings, photos, videos, multi-sensory virtual reality, numerical tables, word processing documents, databases, three-screen calendar, detailed contacts, music, games… Each of those data files could be cross-referenced and cross-pollinated and cross-filed and hunted down in a picosecond by entering a few keywords into the search. Even their related material would show up in a handy popup you could access with one click of the—
Mouse? Pah. How cumbersome.
You don’t bother with a mouse. You are more efficient than Tony Stark.
You don’t even have to swipe that multi-screen hologram badassery across the field of your vision. All you have to do is imagine and BING! There it is. You can keep three dozen programs up and running strong at any given time—and you do!
Wait a second.
Did you just say “do”?
Surely you mean “did.”
Because that was the supercomputer.
This is the basement, and we don’t organize things like that around here anymore. Instead, we do it in the most logical way possible to keep track of so much dissimilar data.
Drumroll please…
Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…
We file it all in
ALPHABETICAL ORDER, YO!
🤘 We’re awesome like that.🤘
Say this in your best Hermione Granger voice:
FOR EXAMPLE…
Under B for Ball (get ready because this is a monster folder…) there are:
Reference materials for basketballs, volleyballs, softballs, foozballs, pinballs, and the like. There are video snippets and journal entries from the Winter Ball in seventh grade, the big red bouncy-ball that Jenny Jenkins purposely smashed into your face in third grade, and every man’s testicles you’ve ever seen (including your father’s when you were nine and unexpectedly walked into the TV room late that one night—he was mortified, but not quite as mortified as you were, and he had to quick adjust his position on the couch in his green robe but the image was totally seared into your mind for alllllll tiiiiiime even though everybody pretended it never happened).
For such a broad and widely varied topic as Balls, there are a great many sticky notes directing you to other folders and filing cabinets:
Ball, basket: see Basketball
Ball, dodge: see Dodgeball
Also see: Trauma: Fifth Grade Fiasco: ref. Trench
Also see: Movies: Humor
Ball, event: see Dance: Social
Ball, fooz: see Foozball
Ball, having a: see Pleasure
Ball, slang: see Body: Male: Testicle
Ball, soft: see Softball
Balls, slang: see Courage
Etc…
Since the Basketball Folder happens to be one in which some cross-referencing has been done, you will find the following notecard taped to the back cover:
See also:
Cheerleading: Basketball Squad
Eighth Grade Athletics Teams
Gym Class
Loathsome Activities
Mascot Fiasco, The
Neighborhood Recreation
Quitter (where you would discover, if curiosity led you to seek out that file, three lengthy dissertations arguing why it was appropriate and correct to willfully be a quitter at something for the first time in your life—the largest letter to yourself, another to your parents, and the last highly abridged version to your coach.)
(A coach who, as it is noted in his file, was baffled by just how badly you sucked at this sport, given your speed, maneuverability, agility, balance, power, jump height, obsessive dedication, and general athletic prowess. This coach apparently missed how often you trip over air, get beaned between the eyes while trying to catch a softball, or throw said softball to third when you were aiming at second. Coach remained unwaveringly adamant that you could be transformed into a phenomenal ball-handler if you just sucked—I mean, stuck with it. You have his response letter, too. It shows the wrinkles from being crumpled, thrown in the trash, fished out, and flattened for filing because we believe in saving every single little teensie-weensie piece of related information that might, on the off-chance, be pertinent to any given topic around here.)
Sports
Summer School
Things I Suck At
Ahem.
Yeah. Me and Basketball.
Moving on.
Were you to take out any one of these folders from the filing cabinets and open them, you would find all the snapshots, video clips, soundtrack music, scratch-n-sniff patches, magazine perfume ads, documents, and ledgers for each listed category.
Some folders are better organized than others. Some possess items that are faded, crumpled, torn, water-marked, and illegible in spots. Some of the videos and photos are grainy; others are as clear as a spotless mirror.
But no matter the organization or disarray, the whole ginormous lot is still filed…
Drrrrrrrrr…
ALPHABETICALLY.
Cross-referencing is an onerous treasure-hunt about as rewarding as an old Cracker Jack toy on Christmas.
There is also no rhyme or reason as to which folder any information will get filed into. For example:
One person’s favorite perfume will get filed under their name.
Another’s will get filed under Scents: Perfumes
Sometimes the scent of cigarette smoke will also get filed under Scents, whereas sometimes it goes into Icky Stuff with a reference to someone’s name.
Sometimes there’s no reference name. It’s just plain Icky.
Yeahhhh…really efficient, isn’t it?
Of course, storing all your memories is one thing. Accessing them and putting them to use for further growth and development is a completely different animal.2
ELECTRICAL JUICE REQUIRED
Sucky random fact before we push pause for the day:
Your entire body’s wiring was built to be operated by the supercomputer. That means your base functionality still requires the same quantity of electrical juice as it did before your downgrade to these lovely filing cabinets and their even lovelier retrieval system.
See, that supercomputer came with the most efficient charger and a quantum battery, therefore you now get to stab an un-grounded outlet into your right buttcheek so you can operate on two-prong extension cords, the loaned generators of your friends and fam, and your car’s cigarette lighter.
Go you.
Looks a lot like Clark Griswold’s towering, teetering Christmas light extravaganza dangling off your stairwell. When you transport it into the car, it kinda gets in the way of your stick shift but you’ve learned to jerry rig the mess over your rear-view mirror so you can…you know…drive?
On the days when you’re capable of driving, much less lighting up your super-suit with its 25,000 twinkle lights, it kinda feel like…
UP NEXT:
Trying (and failing) to access these files and folders in OBLIVIATE: TBI’S annoying habit of vaporizing random memories
© 2020 Hartebeast
RELATED POSTS:
THE SUPERCOMPUTER - why being told after my first neuropsychological exam that—good news!—my injury “must not have been that bad” because, except for a few distinct places where I was registering at the level of what they called mental retardation back in 2001, I “still had pretty average intelligence across the board” and I even had some…um…anomalous super-high spikes that kinda shocked them. Kinda shocks everybody every time we do these tests.
I know, I know, “gifted” is a loaded, even contentious term. But it’s the one we have. This was the brain I started out with:
The Gifted Brain Revealed - Unraveling the Bright Experience - I was born with overexcitability in every one of these categories.
Understanding the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) - another way of putting it for y’all who like video better.
6 Different Types of HSP - again, I was born with all of these. I really do still have them all. There’s just a lot of damage in there to jerry-rig and work around.
Our earliest memories start even earlier than previously thought - I used to be a memorization machine. Math, science, history, language, lyrics, plays, dances, life events, and too many obscure random facts that I technically had no operational need to know. I’ve shocked my parents with just how far back my memories go. “You remember that?!” Yup. Even to this day, I have clear memories from being in a crib, a highchair, and on a changing table. And not all of them are traumatic. It’s everything that came after the car wreck that is messed up.
MEMORY
How does the brain heal itself? Understanding neuroplasticity after TBI
It’s impressive how many helpful metaphors you have to help you convey your experience. The supercomputer down to filling cabinet one definitely captures the ‘clutter’ of mind fog really well.
It’s a pity that whether a supercomputer or a filing cabinet there is no removing the sight of your fathers balls aye. Haha :)