Background first: I have noticed before that there is a big, sometimes disturbing chasm between short-term memory and long-term memory — something very important that only makes it into the former can be utterly forgotten three months later (I once noticed that the only Simpsons episode I managed to watch twice in its entirety before realizing I’d seen it before was the one that’s divided into twenty-two minute-long stories, and I suspect it’d left no long-term imprint on my memory because each story only went into short-term memory without sparking the neurons that would normally track a longer plot).
Well, in a more alarming example of forgetfulness, even though I mentioned about one month ago that about a month before that Dave Whitney and I had been wondering what inspired the distinctive, beepy opening riff of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine” (which I have since learned was voted the best guitar riff of all time by Top Guitar magazine), I wrote that month-ago blog entry without recalling that an astonishing coincidence had occurred the very weekend after Dave and I e-mailed about the song: I overheard a guy in Vegas just two days later claiming Slash was inspired by the perpetual-tumbling beeping sound of a roomful of slot machines — and, as is often the case in Vegas, I was promptly distracted and forgot that I’d just heard a plausible explanation for one of life’s great mysteries.
And in a just world, obviously, I’d get some sort of NIH psych-research grant for telling that story.
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