This week, Adam asks us:

You’ve been given the choice of having 5 memories removed from the world’s collective memories. If you forget them, it will be as if they never happened. Which 5 do you choose?

Man, this is a hard, hard question. I don’t imagine that forgetting big tragedies would be a good thing, so my answers will all have to be personal an idiosyncratic.

1. Disco. People might remember the era, the drugs, the wild sex, all of that… I wouldn’t steal that from them, of course. But I want them to forget that horrible, abominable music.
2. 80s Hair. I am wiping this from the world’s memory simply so it can be wiped from mine. I’m sure latent trauma would remain in my mind, but forgetting would be so sweet.
3. That Whole Dungeons & Dragons = Satanism campaign scare. Remember that? I think it still gives a very intellectual and interestig hobby a bad name, and the response to it, that all gamers are apolitical, smallminded, unbeliveably nerdy geeks, is not just false, but it’s annoying.
4. The fact that those things in cars, when you push them, cause the car to emit a honking sound. Hey, what can I say? It’d give me a few weeks of peace and quiet until some clever jerk figured it out and told all his friends and the roads became noisy again.
5. The fact that Elvis is actually dead. Think of all the popculture references that would no longer make sense; the people who would search for him; the profound weirdness of a society who suddenly forgot that its biggest deceased pop icon had died in a rather humiliating fashion so long ago. The sudden news reports, exposé after exposé; and finally, nobody would really much care. Well, or maybe it would have a profound impact on the world, though I don’t think so.

It occurs to me that another question we could ask is, “What are five things that you wish the world would remember, things that would enter the collective consciousness of humanity and never drop away?” This would be a much harder question to answer, I suppose, but it could be interesting. Some other Friday, though, not today, I have stuff to do.