1.

I had the car, so it must be within the last couple years, but I don't know the highway. I was a long way from anywhere, and I have a memory I think must have been a little earlier, of driving through a strange flat land with dead trees and oily puddles of lakes. But this one picks up where I'm eating dinner in a large log house with an elderly couple. I don't recognize them, I think we must have just met, and they're being very hospitable. Earlier the man was showing me something in the garage that he was proud of. A computer-controlled milling machine, maybe? Maybe it was more like a jigsaw. I think he had built it himself. He was using it to make stupid kitschy plywood cut-outs and she would douse them in acrylic latex. Such a waste. The room was decorated with the cut-outs and I had seen more in the yard.

What I remember clearly is that the man shook my hand and disappeared off to the garage again, I think I was some kind of important person and he'd been glad of the chance to show me the thing in the garage and to tell me some things that had been weighing on his mind. Then I was bent over near the door, pulling on my shoes, ready to leave, and I saw the row of pins stuck in the door frame in a crazy snaking line, and I remembered what the man had told me about a row of pins. I stood up, wiggling my toes in the shoes, and spoke to the woman, but I saw the careworn look on her face and she told me, "No, no, don't you pay any attention to him! He don't mean it! He don't know what he's talking about." I was about to speak again but she came toward me, fiercely, almost as if she was ready to push me out the door. She was a tiny frail thing but I saw I had to leave then. She was afraid of the power I represented and I didn't want her to be afraid. I knew that after the door closed on my back she'd be adding another pin to that row. Maybe more than one.

2.

From about the same time, it was the Winter Solstice but I don't know which year. Come to think of it, I have other memories from all the last several Solstices so although this is funny, I could almost believe this one is a memory from *next* year, or even the one after that. I was in a bar and the memory has that swimming quality that shows I'd had at least one beer already, probably no more than that, and I was listening to a girl with a guitar, up on a stage. She was pretty good; they always are; but the memory is about someone else, someone else who had come for the music. All I remember of her, at least all from that night, is one clear image - a hand gripping the handle of a mug of beer, clenched tightly, holding it at an angle. She had two bracelets of braided string, kid stuff, commemorating some friendship, you know like we used to make in Summer camp; and she had old scars crisscrossing the inside of her wrist. I knew they were self-inflicted, but not really - I mean, I didn't really know, I just assumed because even on just that one image which is all I remember, I thought I knew everything there was to know about her.

Some amount of time had passed, so now I guess we're regressing even farther into the future, and everything was all completely different. It would have to have been a few hours or years. Now she and I were very close. I don't know if we had just slept together; I kind of think we had, but that isn't in the record. What I have is another image, same wrist, the woman's right wrist, and in the image I'm holding it between my hands, running the pad of my thumb along the line of one of her scars. I think she enjoys the contact, it's like a caress, but I'm using a different part of my brain, the investigating part, I'm not thinking about her as a woman but rather I'm fascinated by the physical properties of what I'm holding in my hand. ("Oh, romantic!" you say. Well, shut the fuck up.) It's like a film loop - I see my thumb travel along the scar from left to right and then there's a little glitch and I see it start at the left again. The loop goes through four or five cycles before I see what fascinated me so much at the time, which is that the pale line of the scar has grey dashes under it, and now the tactile is tuning in and I'm feeling the grey bars under her skin. There are four no five objects embedded in her wrist. They're each a centimeter or so long, maybe a millimeter in diameter, little pins or cylinders of rigid material that I'm guessing is metal, embedded end to end. I wonder if she cut herself, or was cut by someone else, specifically so these things could be inserted. The film loop stops repeating and I see her wrist pulled out of my hands, she's pulling her wrist from my hands, and the record ends.

3.

From when I was a teenager and spending a lot of time reading TAB books: it was just the era when every microcircuit of any significance would be packaged in a 40-pin DIP, and they were starting to look at other ways of doing it because 40 wasn't enough. Okay, that time was before I was a teenager, but shoot me, I lived in a small town and the library wasn't up to date. My idea of an exciting new CPU, at least from the point of view of scratch construction which was all I ever thought about, would have been (This doesn't even make internal sense, I must have been a lot younger than I remember being) it would have been that Texas Instruments chip where the 16-register file shadowed a section of memory and the whole thing was stuck to one of those oh-so-flat ceramic dips, you know, the long sexy ones with a diamond boss on every gold-plated pin. 64 pins. Not just 40, something special. I don't still have the book so I couldn't quote you the model number. I think that book went into the computer club liquidation sale, and I'm sorry but I think it was one of the ones I couldn't even give away, that ended up getting pulped. Sic transit, don't you tell me about ball grids.

Hey, remember using a socket on a 14-pin MSI logic circuit because you didn't want to risk applying soldering iron heat to the actual chip? Those were the days, when we used real bipolar TTL and damn the batteries instead of faking it with 74HCT, eh?

4.

This is an easy one. Far in the past, before I was even born, it starts with a timeless corridor in a university somewhere. I think it was in the U.S.A. so it couldn't be so very old as all that, but timelessness is key: this was a place that had looked the same for decades. Floor to ceiling, little wooden drawers with numbers on them. You know, the kind of thing you'd see in a pre-computerization library card catalog. Every drawer had a flowery metal holder so a carefully handwritten card could be inserted. It was just like a card catalog but there were so many drawers as to hold cards for more books than any library could ever hold. I remember thinking of a picture I once saw of the Mormon genealogical files, but the proportions of the drawers were all wrong for that and the key image here is of a man in timeless clothing, always out of fashion, pulling out one of the drawers and looking inside. Inside were beautiful iridescent beetles, impaled on steel pins, each with its own carefully handwritten label.

There's also an image from a decade or two later, and this one allows me to date it more precisely: the professor looks twenty years older than in the first image, and he's standing in a field someplace, bossing his students around, and I know from their hairstyles that this is sometime in the 1980s. He is telling them how to pin and label their insect specimens. It is an elaborate and finicky process, involving tools and techniques unchanged in more than a century. There are at least half a dozen different kinds of pin that all look alike to me, but only one of them is correct for any given insect - and of course, the bugs all look alike to me too. The pin must pass through the body at a certain angle and a certain location just behind the head, and the label must also be speared on the pin at a certain distance away from the specimen with the steel penetrating the ultimate, precise center of the paper label. I think that the reason for these ancient laws is that some day these students will have left their own traces in the hall of drawers. It is important that their pinned specimens must blend in with the others in that place; all pinned exactly alike.

5.

I was standing on a trail, a nice dirt trail with a row of rocks along one side, and it was on a mountain with a view down to the sea. I think I was twelve years old and it was at Summer camp and I was with a group walking back from swimming. I had memories from the swimming but they don't signify. I was ahead of the group and I was waiting for them to catch up. Bright sunlight in my eyes, I turned and saw it glint on something on the bark of a tree. I assumed it was golden drops of resin, and I turned and almost tripped over my feet. I was a clumsy child.

The glint was not resin - it was the shiny head of a long pin stuck into the tree's bark. If I had looked more closely I would have seen that there were more of them, at regular intervals of a couple centimeters, all the way up the trunk into the canopy. It was almost like a ladder for some very small person to climb the tree like a telephone pole. The pins had been inserted one by one as the tree grew, but I don't know enough about how trees grow to tell you whether that meant the ones at the top or bottom were oldest.