Late realizations and old news.
The Piece of Me the Internet Ate
I've been on the internet long enough that some of myself has disappeared into it.
Being slow on the uptake I only recently discovered www.Archive.org as a source of cached webpages. I've spent hours searching back through and now finally appreciate how much of myself has evaporated away into the ether.
"It will live on the interent." I don't know if others have heard this phrase as much as I have but it seems to come up whenever subjects of transience in regards to movies or books or culture in general are discussed.
And maybe that's true for the New York Times Archive. But for me, average of the average, skimming accross the surface of the internet between protracted bouts of reality, it all threatens to bubble away like anything else in our ephemeral existance.
I wrote a weekly music column for a website called Gather.com for nearly two years. None of which still "lives of the internet." (apart from archive.org) I wrote reviews and for a site called twistedear.com which webpage now reveals only impenetrable japanese text. Myspace has reformated all of my old journal entries and interactions out of existence. And what of it? I don't have my highschool or college notebooks anymore either. None of the papers I wrote or the terrible creative writing assignments.
The more time goes by and the more the "cutting edge" blunts into stale repetition of cliche, I just wish I could go back and tell myself to back up everything I wrote.
No, nothing more insightful than that. Back everything up people. You can't count on the internet.
-Note: I stridently refuse to capitolize the word "internet." It is not a concious individual or autonomous location. It is an appliance. If I start capitolizing internet then I'll also capitolize toaster.




When were we supposed to start capitalizing internet? I missed the memo.
I have recently been thinking about going further in the direction of letting go of stuff instead of backing up. I had years worth of archived social media and amateur photos on a HDD my kid installed an OS over several years ago. I have not brought myself to try to recover anything yet and have considered letting it all go. Getting rid of more of life's detritus so I move about more freely now that said child is starting his adult life.
Sometimes I feel like I spend too much time thinking about it.
On consistency in capitalization, the capitalization of I but not you, we, mom, dad, etc is the one that comes to my mind often.
Microsoft Word is always bugging me with its little red lines to capitalize internet and I greatly long to have a thorough argument with my computer on the topic.
I imagine it's true that I do spend much more time thinking about the now, without so much of the past still hanging around. But it still aches from time to time to have lost more of it than was necessary. It's likely not too distinct from the angst of mortality just displacing the basic unease with time.