Engine room of the engine room

I should've saved up all those crucial conversation notes and noted them, learned things, moved away from streams of blethering consciousness and restless twittering and consolidated. I should've got a decent job, ate a decent meal and walked a crooked mile in a stranger's shoes, given generously to charity, talked less and listened more. I should've looked out to sea and up into the sky pondering the distance, scale and shape of things and arrived at proper conclusions. But I ate, drank, made merry and pursued that strangest of goals; the sharpening of muscle memory and the memorization of abstract patterns. It was all working well until my memory failed. Now I stand in the engine room and dream of sitting down in another engine room, resting in a less complex and more reliable model.