CANADA: My brain is out of memory

. TORONTO, Ontario / Globe and Mail / January 20, 2009 It's not Alzheimer's, the doctor says. My mind is simply pooped and fed up with me By Paul Hughes I just received a brand-new computer that has, in addition to bells and whistles the names of which I can barely pronounce, a super-ginormous amount of memory. I suspect my old computer was built back in the days when Pong was all the rage, and it's been slipping up in the memory department lately. I've stuffed that processor so full of useless chunks of information that whenever I ask it to do something, it hums and gurgles and generally messes about as if running around some library in a mad search for the answer to my question — before realizing it's not in a library at all, but at the liquor store. If it had any real brains, it would stay there. I know the feeling. My own fleshy microprocessor could use the calming effect of a slosh or two of Bacardi to forget for a little while just how forgetful I've become. It's not that I suspect I'm in the early stages of Losing My Grip, or LMG, as television's Dr. Gregory House might like to put it. I am only 57 (or 58 — I can't quite remember). Thankfully, my doctor dismissed the notion I might have Alzheimer's after I successfully recited the entire 12 times table without a single misstep. He thinks I'm simply overreacting. "For God's sake Paul, your brain is just getting lazy. You've stuffed it full of the useless debris of your pathetic thought processes for over five decades. It's simply pooped and probably more than a little fed up with you." My doctor might have a vague familiarity with Hippocrates, but he certainly never put much stock in the Florence Nightingale approach to practising medicine. Not for him the wiping of the weary brow with the cooling cloth. Instead, he belongs to the school that believes doing no harm means stopping just shy of battering a patient over the head with the sledgehammer of truth until he gets a migraine. Being unable to remember names is the worst. Probably because forgetting someone's name is like denying they exist, or at least the importance of that existence. No one appreciates his or her moniker being lost in the fog of some old guy's brain. When I was younger, it seemed I never forgot a face or the name to slap onto it. Now I'm considering asking family members to wear ID tags. As for strangers whom I've just met, I'm forced to address them all with the same generic label. First name: Hi. Second name: There. Names are only the beginning of an ever-increasing glut of minutiae that my overtaxed noggin is forced to accommodate. Take computers and the Internet. Why you need a password to get a recipe for meatless meatloaf is beyond what little comprehension I may have left. Nearly every website seems to display an almost Masonic paranoia in demanding you first join its secret club by signing in with a username and password. I always forget both. It doesn't matter anyway. By the time I have exhausted every possible entry from my first puppy's nickname to my great-aunt's mother's half-cousin's last name, I'm no longer hungry, strangely enough. I'm beginning to think the whole trouble with life is that everything is in such a constant state of flux that nothing hangs around long enough to be fastened forever in my memory. It's not that I forget everything. I don't wander around the house wondering where exactly I am or how I got there. Although, I have to admit, sometimes I race up our staircase and burst into our bedroom full of frantic purpose, or race down the stairs into the kitchen, only to wonder what it is that I'm doing there. Sometimes I remember my intention right away with a kind of blundering synaptic symphony of fire. Other times, for a terrible fraction of a millisecond, I imagine I've completely lost the use of my faculties. And then it all comes flooding back. "Aha!" I say. "It's all coming back to me now!" The reason — even if the reason is as mundane as wanting to make a baloney sandwich, its significance can't be overestimated. These are blessed moments of forgetfulness. Even though my memory seems to have failed me, at the last moment it pulls up its socks and comes through, wiping away my anxiety. I'm not going crazy because I now remember the why of it all. And that is a frightfully important thing to hang onto, though as I age my innate need to nail everything down to an understandable immobility is slowly vanishing. Or was it ever there to begin with? Paul Hughes lives in North Vancouver, B.C. © Copyright 2009 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc.