A memory needs attention to stay alive.
I learned this the hard way, standing in the dark with a pen and a notebook, dead sober at an underground punk show or a renegade drum and bass function. No drink in my hand and no intent to change that. I needed my hands because I was there to work. I was there to build a memory to come back to later, to paint this picture for someone who wasn’t lucky enough to be in the room.
This was my style when I was reviewing shows for the alt-weekly. Hand notes only, regardless of light or rowdiness. I’d temper my excitement, resist the temptation to wile out, and make a game of it: could I capture enough of this moment to tell it back proper? Could I get the details down before the noise swallowed them up? I’d ask for the assignment when my favorite acts came through town. Sometimes I was the only one asking. Which meant that if I didn’t write it down, it might not get written down at all.
But here’s the thing I didn’t count on. Most of the material worth revisiting — the stuff that lives in the body, not the notebook or the camera roll — is trapped behind a block of fucked up memories and neglect. You don’t just forget — you lose the thread. And then you can’t find it again because there’s no one to ask.
The Bars You Can’t Remember
There’s a bar I can’t quite name. It’s in there somewhere — the stink of it, the stickiness of the floor, the way the light mixed with smoke in the back of the room. But the name is gone. Nobody to ask. No way to look it up. Time has swallowed it up.
I think about haunts from my home town: Billiard Bar. Home Bar. Sand Bar. The Cavern. Liquor Lyle’s and Triple Rock since I moved to Minneapolis. Places that held so much magic for so many people, and that left almost no digital trace. These were not places with developed web presences. Not places whose essence would show up in a Google search even if you knew what to look for. They existed in the texture of the neighborhood, in the non-homogeneous knot of raw humanity — the American experiment in one of its most interesting forms. And when they went away, they went away clean.
Born in 1980, I’m old enough to remember places that disappeared before the internet and before anyone thought to put them there. Before anyone could or knew that they should. There’s a specific kind of loss in that — the disappearance of something that never had a backup. No archived page. No cached version. No digital ghost.
One strange exception is the 1996 Space Jam website, which is still live. Throw spacejam.com into your browser and you’re transported: spinning planets, chunky pixelated graphics, animated GIFs, frames-based layout, the whole thing frozen in amber. Warner Bros. created it to promote the movie and then just… never took it down. It survived for 25 years untouched, one of the earliest film promotion websites ever built, a relic from an era when the internet was new enough that nobody thought to take anything down.
You go to the site, you get taken on a trip down memory lane. Then you realize: man, nothing looks like this on the internet anymore. And it’s clear why. Design moved on. Standards changed. The web grew up. But flip it around and it’s sobering: most of the sites from that era are just gone. Space Jam survives because a corporation forgot to kill it, then kept it around when it became adored as an Easter egg. Everything else disappeared because nobody bothered to save it.
And sometimes it’s worse than disappearance. When it’s gentrification — the bar doesn’t close, it transforms in the ugliest of ways.
Let’s take a place I won’t name, but you know the type. Smell was always somewhere on the pee continuum. The drinks were well under $5. When the A/C was broken, we all happily sweat in there. Nobody cared. The room was alive because the people in it were alive — loud, broke, creative, crammed shoulder to shoulder, playing pool badly, shouting over music that nobody chose but everybody accepted.
Now that same building uses words like “reservations.” “Tasting menu.” “MICHELIN stars.” Add to that a social-media-post-ready gallery of images on the home page of their website. No thanks.
The room is the same shape. But you walk in and the geometry is wrong. The fluorescent lights that used to buzz and flicker have been swapped for Edison bulbs hanging at precise coordinates. The smell — old beer, old smoke, old carpet, the particular smell of a place that has been lived in hard — has been replaced by reclaimed wood and craft IPA. The jukebox that played whatever somebody fed it is now a curated playlist designed by somebody who has never been drunk in this room. The regulars — the people who gave the place its pulse — got priced out and scattered to the wind. The building stayed. The spirit got paved over.
And then there are the ones that left no trace at all. DIY bands who never had a digital footprint. Bands I saw in high school in Dallas — Blush, Mess, Urine Trouble, Swivel. They played in basements and back rooms and bars that don’t exist anymore. Nobody recorded the sets. Nobody archived the flyers. These bands existed in the texture of a scene that has no easy archive to refer to. A dig through Discogs is your best bet in these cases. I found an article from 2000 the other day that mentions many of my friends — a local music scene piece that captured a moment I thought was gone forever. It reminded me of an EP I forgot I had from 1996. I pulled it out. It’s warped now.
The record still plays, barely. The article is still online, somehow. But the bands, the bars, the shows, the specific feeling of standing in a room hearing something nobody else will ever hear the same way — that’s the material that’s racing away from me.
And this denial — the places that only exist in memory now, gone beyond reaching — carries the same hollowing-out as realizing I was denied the magic of natural water for most of my life. Both absences are invisible. Both feel normal until you encounter what was missing.
There are so many memories that I feel like I am racing against time to get down.
Liquid Distrust
When you’re denied certain things, the denial becomes part of the texture of your existence. You don’t notice the absence. It’s just how it is.
I grew up in Texas, for some reason. Vast as it is, Texas has one natural lake within its borders — and even that one straddles the line with Louisiana, a state with a rich and tumultuous relationship with water itself. The bayous. The great Mississippi that drives so much of that land’s persona. The storms that have decided much of its history. But in Texas? Every body of water I had ever been to was a man-made reservoir.
And the river that cuts through the middle of Dallas… that thing doesn’t work. A thousand times or more I’ve told the story: Dallas built its downtown in a flood plain, so it flooded very badly more than once. Then the city voted to move the river. The US Army Corps of Engineers came in and corralled the only hope for natural water roaring through the city, smoothing its meander into tolerable and softened angles. We got left with approximation.
You don’t notice this growing up. You don’t know what a river is supposed to look like because you’ve never seen one. The denial is invisible. It weaves itself into the fabric of your days and you accept it as texture. Natural texture.
There are people fighting this same race in other realms. Dollar Country is a radio show that only plays 45s — actual vinyl singles, physical artifacts spinning on a turntable. They recently got a grant to digitize old country acetates, the raw aluminum-and-lacquer discs that were cut directly in recording booths before tape was the standard. These are the only copies of songs that existed. No master tapes. No digital backups. Just a disc degrading in someone’s attic for sixty years. Dollar Country is out there racing the clock, trying to get the sound off the acetate before the acetate turns to dust.
Same race. Different medium. The feeling pervades.
The Mississippi
It wasn’t until my thirties that I first took the chance to look at a real river.
First trip to Minnesota, summer 2014. The sheer width of the Mississippi just north of the Twin Cities. I jumped out of the car before it had even rolled to a stop. What was this liquid fury? Could water really do this?
You’d think I would have known. My family had driven me from my dad’s hometown near the shores of Lake Huron to Niagara Falls when I was a boy. But it was too different from Texas. The scale was wrong, the sound was wrong, the whole thing didn’t fit inside the reality I had built. It faded back to unreality — a place on a map, a postcard, something that happened to other people in other lives. It wasn’t until I was an adult, a person who had lived a life without water and then moved to Minnesota, that I started to understand a magic I had missed for most of my life.
Here in the Twin Cities, the Mississippi had a waterfall that was migrating up the river from St. Paul. It made it all the way to downtown Minneapolis before our friends at US Army Corps of Engineers — the ones who moved the Trinity River in Dallas and built the levees in New Orleans — put a concrete apron beneath St. Anthony Falls to stop the migration.
That was in the 1870s — about fifty years before they moved the Trinity. And we just got to really getting curious about what’s under there. This summer on my birthday, the University of Minnesota published a report of their findings after a couple years poking around under the St. Anthony Falls. As if I didn’t have enough to read.