collins says...

In a recent interview, notable contemporary poet, Billy Collins, described the fictional character in his mind as he creates poetic justice eloquently as "...a daydreamer, obviously unemployed, plenty of time on his hands, spends a lot of time by himself, and has an unhealthy fascination with his thinking process, his own speculations and fantasies."  No wonder I love his stuff...ha!

Sample of Collins work:
From "Forgetfulness"

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
------
There are various guesses as to his introspection with the letter "L," of which I won't bore myself with.
I interpret the "L," with its context of being the name of a mythological river, to be a river of "Lies." 
Nevertheless, some things we choose to forget, due to the pain of remembrance, or we forget them simply because they were not true, a fabrication of the mind and heart.  We (mankind) have the capability of such a crime.  If its true that most of which we all worry about won't ever happen, then it may be safe to assume that the past can be recreated in an exaggerated fashion too, making the past worst than it really was (i.e. a tragedy more catastrophic than we actually experienced, or a job loss more of a nightmarish experience than an accurate account of the facts).  Facts are much more easily remembered than emotional fabrications that somehow numb the pain of the awful truth, usually about us. 
Why is it that the older you get, the more forgetful you seem to become?  Perhaps because the past is so painfully true, if and when totally revealed, in comparison to the collection of make-believe scenerios that we have held to be true.