It's strange to articulate, but I've lost my web center. How to explain? Let me try this way:

Fall of 1990, I was 200 lbs, a brand new high-school senior. Somewhere in my head I decided I didn't want to be so big, and somewhere in my body, something changed. Everything got unsettled, and when the chaos subsided, I had a metabolism with a resting balance of 170 lbs. No monumental effort, just a natural change. That and I grew my hair long, but that's probably coincidental.

Around 1993 one day I suddenly was paranoid of public toilets. It's as if I was dropped into an alien culture and had no experience with them before, as I had no memory of how I felt about using public toilets, and therefore was timid about using them (sit-down only. No problem with urinals). I knew it was something I needed to get over, but I couldn't remember how I thought about them before.

In short, it was as if I had become so accustomed to feeling a certain way, that when I experienced the subject in question, I completely stopped reinforcing the behavior or feeling, and suddenly that engrained feeling vanished from non-reinforcement, and I was left using episodic memory instead of procedural memory to figure out (and remember) how I felt about things.

No, it's not just toilet trauma either. In 4th grade I suddenly became paranoid about sharing straws with my best friend Ali. When taking classes at UCLA my senior year in high school I had to remember how to walk casually. Suffice it to say that now and then skills, no, habits, completely disappear and I have to relearn them from scratch.

Okay, so taking the long way around: I've lost my web center. I used to have a routine, a litany of sites to churn through, blogs, news sites, humor, a regular garden path I would walk each morning to reacquaint myself with the world around me, yet somewhere along the past few weeks the garden's become overgrown and all the paths are obscured.

To take a different metaphorical angle, it's as if my site memory is like a standing wave on a string, keeping it's own form, changing only amplitude. Then a dissonance comes along and throws the oscillations just out of whack enough that they lose any sense of harmony; not just a beat pattern when the two tones happen to match up, but a chaotic loss of any frequency at all (or random mix of all frequencies, depending on how you look at it).

Coincidentally enough, this may be an apt metaphor, as this is one theory on how the hippocampus both writes and eventually (approximately two weeks after the first encounter) erases medium-term episodic memory. It fires the pyramidal hippocampal cells in time with the Alpha wave during the early stages of sleep, reinforcing procedural learning of the previous cycle. This is the effect of feeling like you're on a roller coaster when falling asleep after a day at the amusement park, or perhaps more recognizably, the feeling of seeing geometric forms falling from the sky after playing too much Tetris. This is the feeling of your brain learning new abilities.

You don't notice weeks later when the selfsame cells fire in the inverse of the Alpha waves (having gradually moved out of phase since day one until they are exactly a half-cycle behind), erasing the mid-term memory. You don't notice because this is when the procedural memory has either become established in long-term storage, or has fallen into disuse and is being 'recycled.' This is the stage when playing Tetris (or Dance Dance Revolution) goes from the stage of easily reading and dealing with the oncoming symbols, to the stage of doing so without liminal thought. This is when you can carry on a conversation without losing much skill.

Okay, floating off topic, but maybe you've caught my point. I don't have a bookmarks list. I don't have a page with all my favorite links on them. I have a brain with a notoriously short attention span, that knows what sites to look at from procedural, and to a lesser extent, mnemonic devices. Now that that procedure has gone without reenforcement, and has fallen victim to chaos, I have to try and remember sites I've been to, and judge whether I want to go again. It's like I'm starting from scratch, with my only roadsigns being episodic memory of having been to this site or that one, and the fledgling procedural memories that have been reinforced for the last month, namely CNN, SFGate, ABCNews, Yahoo News, etc.

It's enough to mess with a guy's head.

It's really enough.