You created out of the rooms and objects of your home a mind palace. Sixty unique places, from your bed to your nightstand to your window and all the way to the backdoor. A path that snaked from waking to outside. You went to a website that generated random lists of objects and found that by putting the beach ball on your bed and the stapler on your nightstand and the coffee cup by your window and so on that you could memorize the order of those objects easily and quickly. You practiced until your errors were few and then nonexistent.

You moved onto numbers. Here you took 000, 111, 222, 333, all the way to 999, and ascribed to each a unique person acting on some object. The hundreds place was a person or character or animal, the tens place was the act, and the ones place was the object. You made the acts and objects sexual or fantastic or absurd. 000 was Goku spirit bombing a vagina. 111 was Richard Feynman nuking a safe. 222 was the night elf Illidan double attacking (with warglaives) a mountain giant. 333 was a cute kitten roundhouse kicking a pikachu. 666 was Deadpool fucking a Rhino. And as you walked around, in moments of boredom, you made more mind palaces until you had hundreds and then thousands of locations, places, to put things in. You had so many mind palaces you found it necessary to make a mind palace to remember your mind palaces.

Say you wanted to quickly remember the string of numbers: 663 320 233. The number, for example, 663, would be Deadpool fucking a pikachu. And you’d place that image on your bed. Then, 320, would be a kitten scraping its claws on a vagina, and you’d place that nightmare of a scene on your nightstand. The last, 233, would be Illidan kicking pikachu in the face. You’d place that by your window. All the permutations of your original ten absurdities turning the first one thousand digits (with 1 as 001 and 2 as 002 and 99 as 099 and etc.) into the weird and the fantastic. 661 being Deadpool fucking a safe, 662 being Deadpool fucking a giant (maybe Andre the Giant), 611 being Deadpool nuking a safe. And all this went on and on for longer strings until you could memorize at a digit per second and then faster, nearing 500 random digits in 5 minutes.

You went further. You expanded your number system to playing cards, exploding it into 52 unique living things acting on some object. Each to a card. And ordered, somewhat, by suits, where all the Clubs, for example, were famous athletes acting on some appropriate (or deeply inappropriate) object. Hearts were loved ones, Diamonds were billionaires, Spades were anime characters, kings and queens were couples, jacks were bachelors, etc. This took some time, more than for the numbers, but after a year of practicing ten minutes a day you could memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards in under thirty seconds, with every three cards being a sexual or absurd image and placed in a single position in a mind palace.

You felt like a really dumb Sherlock Holmes.

And when your mind palaces were full, you’d imagine them exploding, burning to the ground, and all you’d have to do is wait a day and reimagine them empty and refill them at your leisure, with whatever you wanted to memorize.