I’m still intoxicated from drinking too much last night. The room I gather myself in isn’t the same room I’ve been in, but it’s the room other people have gone into before. The memories of the other people are stored externally within the room, and I have to figure out how to make sense of them even though none of them have anything directly to do with me. What is helpful is that I am interested in other people and their feelings about the world. At least one person works to make sure the externalized memories of the other people are kept in workable condition in this room, but they aren’t here right now. Nobody can directly help me. The room is supposed to be neutral to allow for the externalized memories of the other people to remain the focal point, but I’m still intoxicated from drinking too much last night, so I can’t really focus on them that well. Also this room has a bunch of discarded objects in it as well which can distract me or at least instill within me a particular atmosphere in and of itself. I can become skeptical about my own abilities to differentiate between externalized memories of other people and discarded objects. Even if the other people didn’t directly enter the room before me to form the memories that they externalized within the room, their presence still interacted with this room before I found myself within it. Sometimes my memories of similar rooms that I’ve found myself within before interact with my experience of this room, which I can decide to either inform my understanding of my experience or to block its muddying influence. Either way I have to use what I know and what I can teach myself with the externalized memories of other people within this room in order to solve for my being in the room and leave it. In my leave of the room, if I can say that I ever truly leave the room, I will come to a fuller understanding of myself and of the people who entered the room either physically or otherwise before me.

– Anastasios Karnazes