Today is the 8th anniversary of the time I caught a truck with my brain (would not recommend) and ever since my memory has been more leaky than a machine-gunned sieve...
this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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Damn... well, at least you're not alone with such problems. Let's keep moving, tovarish. 
I'm sorry that happened to you friend, but I do love the phrasing, as morbid as it may be. It gave me a good chuckle. I hope you're managing okay. That's got to be tough to deal with.
I've got a non-cancerous tumor in one of my temporal lobes so I understand on some level at least how it feels. For me it mostly just means I don't remember a lot of my childhood (I'm not missing out on much, it wasn't great) and go blind when my blood pressure spikes though rather than my short-term memory. It sucks always having to wonder whether your deficiencies are because of your maimed brain or your unmaimed brain. That's the worst part for me.
people give me looks when i try to explain my strategy for my living space, but basically i try to organize things around principles of efficiency as articulated in like those lean systems and TPS guides. somewhere in there is the nucleus of designing spaces for function even when people are coming and going with varied amounts of institutional kniwledge and experience, and they need to be able to rapidly understand what is going on and how well its happening, almost intuitively.
effectively, what this means is removing the guesswork or the need for memory. labeled spaces, color coding, simple routines. the ideal would be that a complete stranger could walk into my kitchen (a highly functional complex space with many unique inventories) and know where everything is at a glance and what is available/low.
everything has an obvious place and its clear when it is not in its place, it creates a visual check to remind me of something in process elsewhere or push me to confirm where something is.
anyway, these ideas are critical for efficiency in shared production spaces, but maybe 15 years ago when i was learning them, i thought "why not integrate some of these ideas at home?" where its just me.
as i get older, it seems like its helping me create guardrails for myself and a process for taking on more complex tasks that would otherwise feel overwhelming to try and grasp in their totality.
im probably doing a shit job at explaining it. i tried to explain it conceptually to a friend once and they just dismissed it with "I don't need to label things, i know where they are."
i wanted to be like, "that's not even the point. and also: no, you don't." memory is deeply unreliable, and knowing that allows us the humility to develop systems and improve/adapt.