I have had something of a strange thought banging around half formed inside of my brain lately. You can tell me, but I think it is symptomatic of this furiously, technologically linked-in world in which we have all found ourselves living.
But let me start at the beginning, you have that kinda time, right? Well don’t worry, you can play Words with Friends while you read this, I won’t be offended.
The Beginning: I have had a couple of nearly picture perfect weekends lately (two out of three and that third one wasn’t too shabby either!) and a couple Monday mornings ago I found myself standing outside of work about twenty minutes early (as is my custom for reasons passing understanding) and so I was going through my phone and deleting spam-flavored emails and checking The Facebook and (pointedly) re-reading texts (I get a smidge obsessive-y, which is no doubt clear to you since I still write a blog [Although come on! If this was 1998 I would be the hippest cat that you know!]).
I am doing a very poor job of writing this blog entry. Let me start again.
The Beginning, Again: So I have had some very good weekends lately and they were really and actually good, not just the kind of good that we content ourselves with when we spend Saturday night lit up all laptop-blue and trying to convince ourselves that Pinterest and Stumbeupon are the same thing as fun. I’m not bragging or anything (look at how cool and awesome and fulfilling my life is!), I'm simply saying that actually participating in the life is sometimes even better than observing it from the bottom of the 4G connection on your phone. But then sadly Monday reared up and I found myself thumbing my way through my own phone before work and I discovered that not only had I not missed anything in the world, but also, that my very wonderful weekend had gone almost entirely undocumented. Can you believe it?! Not a single Facebook post or Tweet or picture or email, nary even a text to record the whole damn thing.
This inspired in me two sudden, simultaneous and conflicting emotions.
The first is relatable to all of us, I think. Mainly that it was so very refreshing and sweet to have had a totally unconnected bit of life. It was like a deep, deep breath taken in Downward-Facing Dog, or something! I felt so off-the-grid awesome! I felt like the good kind of hippie! (The kind that showers, looks like a normal human being, recycles without making a big deal about it, in case you were curious).
It was the sort of free and relaxed and, dare I say, proud feeling I get when I go for a hike and there is no one else around at all. There is something very fortifying and affirming about thinking to yourself, “I am so unconnected right now that if I tripped and fell down this ridge right here, I would pretty much be on my own and would most likely die … because I have Sprint and the service sucks up here on this firebreak … so I had better not fall …”
But I’m digressing again.
So now this is the other thought I had about my undocumented, unconnected weekend and I’m sure that this is relatable to most of us as well: startlingly strong anxiety.
As in: What the hell do you mean there are no texts or pictures or Facebook updates or Tweets or blogs or what the hell ever else? How the hell am I going to REMEMBER this?!
See, I’m one of those people who locks a particularly good (or bad) text message. I save pictures on my phone until the contract is up and then I have those pictures transferred to the next phone, just so that I can have memories locked into pixels riding around in my pocket in case I ever want to remember those things. I mean, this is a fucking blog after all! I have so many tiresomely specific memories encoded here that quite often I feel like it is more just my diary than it is my internet presence as a writer who exists in the world.
But this is all taking a lot of words to explain and you’re very busy and important and probably losing that game of Words with Friends you’re playing with your mom, so let me just get to the point:
The Point: There was a part of me, that Monday morning a couple of weeks ago, that was so very afraid of the fact that I had no memories in digital form. I became suddenly and seriously aware of the limited and unreliable ability of my own brain to remember in detail all of the things that I wanted to remember in warm and pristine clarity. And the realization made me a little sad. All of those blurry pics of my cat in my phone are going to exist into the far reaches of forever, but these nice and sweet and wonderful memories are going to melt away at a rate that would be positively unacceptable if my brain were a Polaroid. It was a little hard to know that those memories might fade out of focus and one day bleed into the confused background of my own memory.
I suppose this is not a new concern. And really, I suppose it is really about the fleetingness of life and not just the fleetingness of memory.
I thought that all of this was rather profound when I sat down to write, but now it feels a little saccharin. But who the hell cares? It isn’t like you’ll remember this post tomorrow anyway.
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