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• What’s your best time?

I was in Chicago a couple of weeks ago to see Dinosaur Jr. The seeing the band part has nothing to do with the actual column, but they were completely awesome just the same. Anyway, while I was up there I met up with a friend who used to live in town that I hadn’t seen for awhile. We eventually started telling old stories. They were hilarious, ironic, insightful and probably not especially true. The truth didn’t matter all that much. I’d really prefer to rely on memory instead of evidence when it comes to old stories. It makes everyone seem far more interesting than they actually are.

I think it probably becomes like a game of telephone. A person tells the story somewhat close to what actually happened but adds a little something to make it more interesting. Eventually, those added comments become more funny and interesting than the actual facts. Things get added and taken away until the whole thing becomes a work of art. It’s a total community project and even though it’s probably not ideal to lie, it makes for far more interesting stories when a bunch of folks are standing around drinking beer.

All of this embellishing could be coming to an end soon. A U.K. company called Vicon will soon begin producing a camera that users wear around their necks. The device is programmed to automatically take pictures of whatever is going on, as often as every thirty seconds. Such a camera could really throw a monkey wrench into the art of story elaboration. “Oh, I was gonna tell this fantastic story about what happened last night, but I reviewed the pictorial evidence and it turns out it was pretty much just a bunch of drunk people standing around in a circle. I have to tell you though; it seemed very funny at the time.”

It’s tough to come down too hard on this company though. The camera was originally designed to help out Alzheimer’s patients by allowing them to look back over what happened during the day. I’m sure it was also used by the caretakers of Alzheimer’s patients to find out exactly where the piss Grandpa was at all damned day when they couldn’t find him. It’s nice their heart was in the right place but the problem is once that technology gets out, people will use it not just for good, but also for evil. You know, the kind of evil that makes all of us into liars.

I have to admit, it’s sort of a cool idea to have a document of your entire life. It’d be nice to look back on certain points and see how it really was. I don’t need a whole lot of confirmation to determine how dorky and dipshitty all my friends and I were in grade school, but it’d still be hilarious to see. The pictures from high school wouldn’t be that much better, I’m afraid. Geez Louise, the more I think about it, I can’t imagine any picture from the past doing anything but embarrassing the hell out of me.

I bet it would be sort of an eye opener about some things though. I can imagine being an old man and looking back on some random day in the early 1990s. “Oh wow, my clothes don’t look as stupid as I thought. Geez, I forgot all about that apartment. I wonder what happened to that couch? What the hell am I doing in that picture, making a sandwich?” Eventually, I would stumble upon the sad and terrible fact that there were many days when the most interesting thing I did was sit on the couch and watch television for fifteen hours.

It would be nice to look back and see pictures of some of the old friends I’ve long forgotten. Of course, those pictures would probably show us sitting on the couch and doing nothing but watching television for fifteen hours, but still, it’d be nice just to reminisce. I mean, I have a crapload of old pictures that I go through every so often, but virtually everyone is posing for those, so it seems like less of an actual document of the time. Everyone in those pictures is also holding a beer over their head and pretending they’re the lead singer for a metal band, so that also lessens the impact a little bit.

The thing I do like about it is that it’s not really pictures of you; it’s pictures of everything around you. This is appealing to me because I never take a good pictures, and I’d just as soon not have a lifetime of evidence of this fact.

It’s probably not the worst thing in the world that there could finally be some quality controls on all those stories people tell about their lives. Maybe we’re all getting a little carried away with the embellishing and a record of pictures might be just the thing to challenge us. We might have to actually do all of those interesting things instead of just talking about them. We might have to think faster so a person can actually say that perfect zinger at the time rather than adding it a few years down the road. Almost constant pictures of our lives could possibly make us far more compelling people. It could make us try harder. It could be sort of nice, but I’m betting it just makes us all a little more boring.