throw it out,
don't be caught with that old,
ratty thing, it's past its prime,
no longer sublime,
it's the one thing
that comes with me
no matter where i go,
despite the fact that i cannot
give a good gosh-darn reason
why i keep dragging it along,
i'm not sure it understands
what it means,
but it means,
it means,
it means
This seems like a Google search type of question, or at least that’s what I did. I’m not a huge history buff. I was never great at remembering specific dates, though I could definitely always tell you when the War of 1812 started.
But, from my quick Google search, it looks like the Supreme Court issued their ruling in 1966 on this day about Miranda v. Arizona, which would forever change how police interrogations are performed, and is also the reason that every time a bad guy on Law & Order is arrested, their Miranda rights are read as the cuffs are being put on them.
Then there was the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty that was signed in 1373, which I know very little about, but it seems like it’s the oldest treaty that’s still in effect to this day. I suppose that makes sense, because I’ve never heard of Portugal and England going against one another.
My favorite event that took place on this day from my Google search was that today was the day that O.J. Simpson had his slow speed chase in 1994 that kicked off the circus show that eventually became his trial, acquittal, and his legacy from here on out.
But yeah, it seems like June 13th is a random day to choose to ask a question about what happened on this day in history. There’s definitely more things that happened, I’m sure. But I’m not certain that it really matters what specific day an event happened on. I mean, in each example that I found, the context of what happened before and then what happened later complete the full picture of the event.
I also suppose that any of these events wouldn’t have meant all that much if what happened after the fact hadn’t also amplified their importance. No one would really still be talking about the O.J. trial if it hadn’t been royally screwed up by LA’s district attorney’s office, or if O.J. hadn’t been completely weird as shit about it by writing a book titled If I Did It a little over a decade afterwards.
And then the Miranda’s rights ruling is really only memorable and seared into America’s public consciousness due to how much it changed police procedure. Obviously the actual person that the rights are named after, Ernesto Miranda, was a super horrible person that most people probably would not want their legal rights to be associated with. I do find it kinda strange that we often times name certain legal rights and/or procedures after specific people, when it would probably be more apt to name them after the right and protections that they’re ensuring. Though that might be a conversation about how the human brain works with higher-level abstract concepts, and how we’ve trained ourselves to remember better whenever there is a name attached to the concept.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that specific dates seem to rarely ever matter. Generally, most events and dates require context in order to hold any significance. And that’s the reasoning I will keep using in order to try and never remember a specific date for the rest of my life. Just ask my wife, who will tell you that I forget the exact date of our anniversary all that time.
Though before you judge, my wife also forgets the date of our wedding each year too. In hindsight, I suppose making our wedding date 5 days after our dating anniversary wasn’t the best way to remember it, since we both confuse the 2 dates all that time.
i ate a ghost
that sat in the back of the bus with me,
the ghost called himself steve,
but i found him kinda empty,
and i still felt a little hungry after consuming
his memory
Fred Aiken Writing 