2018.12.16
A few months back, my fiancé decided to unearth his first ever email account. He was surprised and crushed to learn that Hotmail had deleted it over a decade ago. It got me thinking about my physical relics, which live in a plastic bin that he and I have hauled through half a dozen moves: a CD bearing saved photos, though neither of our computers contains a disc drive; a beloved mug that now leaks through a crack; a champagne cork from the day we got engaged. Pack rat though I am, I've been appraising my life all along. When we left Washington, D.C., for Boston a year ago, I threw out a decade's worth of birthday cards and the notes from a recent writing workshop I remember as useless--but kept the fervent birthday letters my mother always writes, and the college syllabi of philosophy books that I keep telling myself I'll revisit someday. I've been wondering which of my digital records are worth carrying like that overfull box--not as heavy, but no less consciously accounted for. I'll never reassemble every scrap of myself I've scattered across Facebook, but I've started downloading my favorite photos and saving them to the cloud. I don't expect to make the historical record, but if the archivists ever came knocking, I'd want to have saved my own annals, and decided for myself what to throw away.LOL, I know that "but if the archivists ever came knocking" hope. (What's life without just a touch of delusional grandiosity?)
So some of the trick is to curate - I mean keep that overfull box on some drive, but at some point make a better online or better yet physical scrapbook of just the best stuff. That's what I did with my years bestof photos series, for instance, and some of the ideas I want to bake into this timelines display I've been messing with.
doctor: treatment is simple. go see orville, very funny clown
pagliacci: what about pagliacci?
doctor: pagliacci? man i could not name a more suckass clown
pagliacci:
doctor: just downright dogshit of a clown
This twitter joke has been stuck with my head for months. If you don't quite get it, see this page (starting with the 3rd panel) about the Watchmen comic most geeks would know it from
Someone tweeted the follow up "doctor: pagliacci not even one of the better-known clowns"