PhotoDude.com

Wed. Oct 10, 2001

Concussion

Concussion – It was a Monday night a month ago. I sometimes get a wild hair to start a project at 11 or 12 at night (I’m a night owl), and I’d been meaning to make a little tutorial of a Photoshop technique for a while. It was very late by the time I finished making it into an entry for PixelPile.org, but I also wanted to make a printer friendly version. I got started on it, but only worked at it a half hour or so. I was tired, and decided to finish it in the morning. I posted the entry as it was, and went to bed. The entry time stamp is 2:21am, September 11.

My radio alarm went off a few minutes before 9am the next morning, blaring the news of a plane hitting the Trade Towers, drawing me half asleep to the TV just in time to see the second plane hit. I stood there, frozen, watching, for I don’t know how long. I don’t remember. But I now can equate the experience to a previous physical trauma. I once got a concussion, and it essentially erased about 3 or 4 seconds of memory, the moments of conciousness that immediately preceeded the blow.

Today, a month later, I accidently stumbled across that partially completed ”print friendly” version on my hard drive, and it stopped me flat. I didn’t immediately remember that I’d begun the page at all, nevermind think of it even once in the month since. As though the memory was erased by the blow.

A trivial event, I know, but one that struck me. And in name of normalcy, I immediately completed the pages and uploaded them.