A thought-provoking quote from Mark Twain:

It is a troublesome thing for a lazy man to take notes, so I used to try in my young days to pack my impressions in my head. But that can’t be done satisfactorily, so I went from that to another stage– that of making notes in a note-book. But I jotted them down in so skeleton a form that they did not bring back to me what it was I wanted them to furnish. Having discovered that defect, I have mended my ways a good deal in this respect, but still my notes are inadequate. However, there may be some advantage to the reader in this, since in the absence of notes imagination has often to supply the place of facts.

From Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, Volume I [1]: 1855-1873 (The Mark Twain Papers)

I have noticed a similar problem sometimes when reading over my old notebooks– I find references to events I can’t remember, and cryptic phrases that make no sense to me now. I usually have a pretty good memory, so to have written down something and still not be able to recall it is quite disturbing! But every once in a while, I’ll find something totally random that now has an interesting ring to it and I enjoy imagining some funny story that could have happened to me but probably didn’t!