A Pilgrim’s Digression

Today’s post is kind of a catch-all in which I discuss a number of things that have no real coherency, except as they relate to blogging. March is of course the anniversary month for my blog, and the past days and weeks, I have been taking a look back, fixing some display issues with old blog posts, checking links in my blogroll (and catching up with some folks), and making note of notable posts from the archives that newcomers to my blog might like to read.

I’d like to list those posts here, but first, whatever happened to…

As the Apple Turns

This was a clever and entertaining site for Mac enthusiasts for many years, throughout the late nineties and into the early years of this century. I would consider it a blog, though it came into existence before the era of blogging. Then, suddenly, it stopped being updated.

At the time, I thought perhaps the creator was redesigning the look of it to conform with the new Mac OS X interface. But no, nothing changed. The site stopped being upgraded, frozen forever on October 12, 2005 at 5:03 AM.

Presumably someone is still paying the hosting bill. Where art thou, AtAT? Until I hear from you, I am removing you from my blogroll.

I ended up removing other blogs from my blogroll as well. One blog was taken over by an advertising site. Other blogs just disappeared or stopped being updated. Even many of the folks who originally founded sodsbrood have faded away, leaving only a core of four or five of us.

It’s sad.

Ask my wife: I’m a collector. I don’t like to let things go. I hold on to things, worthless things, valuable things, people, memories of people and things, even memories that serve only to remind me of my failings or weaknesses. Collecting is probably categorized as obsessive/compulsive behavior, especially when what one collects are, often as not, negative memories and hurtful things. Elijah Wood’s character in Everything is Illuminated was a character I could relate to, on some level.

Lately, I’ve come to think that these blogs, and maybe (in my case) boxes of papers, old letters, old school reports, old playthings, all the accumulated detritus of an ordinary life–in short all the things that are really me–will not remain after I die, no matter how hard I strive to hold on to them. It’s a difficult idea to accustom myself to, after years of thinking I could “preserve” myself, mostly through writing.

If I were to die today, my voluminous email correspondence would be lost to anyone who might be interested–assuming anyone would be interested. Even though my wife and best friend know, or could guess my password, who would print all that out? And why?

My blog might remain for a few years longer, but then it would be lost, too.

The boxes and boxes of papers, journals, stories, letters, artifacts–childish stuff, all–would eventually be forgotten. Let’s assume my wife donated them to the cultural institution where I work. Perhaps you recall the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark?

As part of my daily work, I work with the materials left behind by ordinary folk. The diaries, correspondence, official documents, and artifacts I touch and digitize for public consumption online are a small fraction of what this institution contains in its vast archives.

Every person whose remainders now lie in a box on a shelf within this building, whether that person has been dead fifty years or eighty years or more, or whether they are still alive today, had a vast personal story as rich as my own.  Yet, unless someone like me discovers them, they are forgotten.

Have you ever been to the WWI memorial in Washington? Did you even know it existed? It is one of the most neglected of our war monuments. The veterans who fought in that war are all dead, except for maybe thirty or so centenarian stragglers. And if you visit the tombstones of the dead Great War veterans in local cemeteries across the country, you will probably find the graves themselves neglected by family members, who do not bother putting flowers on the grave of a relative long dead whom they never even knew.

We forget. We forget. And we are lost.

So, myself afraid of being forgotten and lost, I try not to let go of the things, people, places, blogs that have meant something to me, even while acknowledging that it is all in vain.

In closing, here is that list of blog posts from my archives I would like you to recall, or read for the first time perhaps. Oddly, my more creative posts seem to be the ones to which I myself return for a re-reading.

Operating Plan 5 (originally titled “Glazed Donuts”)

A Sanguine Enthusiasm Ensued

Sorry, Wrong Number

Trolley Tracks and Dancing, Purple Cutting Boards

Bohemian Rhapsody

Breakfast dal Trashcan

Goodbye for You

City Mouse/Country Mouse

March Hares

Dazed, Confused

Those Big Balls

Les Chaussettes d’Edgar Poe

Du Temps Perdu

And I think I will stop there. There are too many posts to link them all here. Consider this a Whitman’s sampler, hopefully without the nasty chocolate covered cherries.