Personal Best

Nighttime Painting 1, 2009, acrylic, gravel, glass beads on canvas 11"x14"

The second of the tangents in my previous post brought to mind an exercise I maintained periodically when I lived alone.  It's very possible that I mentioned it previously on the blog, but who's going to go back and check?
This exercise was a mental one in which I tried to calculate, given my current social circumstances, minus any telltale effects of odor, how long it would take for my body to be discovered after dying.  At one point, I figured that I could be dead about a month before anyone would consider my lack of contact a cause for alarm.  Although, my competitive nature yearned to strive for an ever longer period of time, I felt I should do my best to prevent that eventuality from growing past a month.  I think that I unconsciously omitted the odor factor from the calculation.
Now it could be that I'm simply forgetting this, but it was only after thinking about yesterday's post and the story of my dead invisible neighbor that I connected the progressive experience of tracking a dead man's progress through smell and this mental exercise.  I can't believe that a correlation between the two events would have escaped me, but the sensation of making the connection yesterday was so fresh, so revelatory, it felt like a true discovery. 
Although now, I'm feeling like what I've discovered may be the beginning of the dismemberment of my memories as I get further on in my own years.