I’m reminded of the time many decades ago that I was smoking a joint with a pretty hippie chick at a reggae festival in Santa Barbara. We slipped back behind the stage, just the two of us, and hid in the bushes getting high. Real high. She had a fat baggie full of skunk weed and rolled big bomber joints with long psychedelically painted nails.  We were so stoned and I wondered aloud how she gotten that stash past the really obnoxious security. They’d been searching everything and everybody at the gate. She laughed. I hid it in a well concealed place she said. Oh, like in your bra? I’m not wearing a bra she said and she gave a little wiggle. She wasn’t. We traded a joint back and forth. So how did you get it in then? She smiled. Have another hit, she said and pulled a fresh joint from the hem of her hippie dress. Ah ha.

The only reason I remember that story is that I found a scrap of writing once from 1979 describing it. I have pretty massive memory loss from those days–way too many seizures–and have no direct memory of any of it. No idea who the girl was. I don’t know if we knew each other already or not. Or if we did anything more than lie about in the bushes getting stoned and giggling.

It haunts me a bit, this fragment of an afternoon back in 1979. Like a solitary page of an ancient papyrus, it’s all that remains of a story long vaporized into dust. Amnesia.