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the internet is an inherently haunted place if you think about it like. it's so weird to see long abandoned discussion boards stuck in a snapshot of the past, old conversations between kids from over a decade ago who have now grown into their own lives, obituaries taking the form of half finished profiles. and the silence that fills the gaps between. there's a constant ghostly record of each generation's thoughts, fads, their sense of humour. back when the future was at their fingertips. even stranger, people you used to know exist openly in that space, and they watch you watching them. if you want, deceased musicians can play through your headphones. there's always an underlying sense of reminiscing and time escaping our ever shortening attention spans. what a fuckin graveyard

This kind of thought has been on my mind as I go and tend to almost two decades of blog entries (This year I decided to get retroactively persnickety in how I've visually handle quotes over the years.) Skimming the output of my old selves... connected to the current me, but not quite the same person.

If Jim Morrison was alive today, he probably would[n't] write "did you have a good world when you died? Enough to base a wikipedia page on?" and it's harsh to recognize that's probably not the case for me... so I have to make my own monument. (Risking violating Van Webster's direction to "Don't be both Homer and Odysseus--at least not at the same time.").

I think about what I should do to best preserve my public archive - ideally for as long as we have a digital-using civilization. I suppose I will be forever there in the bowels of the Internet Wayback Machine, and god bless for that. I think about ways of paying in advance for my webhosting, and trying to batten down all available hatches so the site is just static HTML and images. (Also toying with the idea of putting a backup archive on blogspot... its business model of funding free, low-traffic blogs with skimming from ad revenue from more traveled blogs might be at least as stable as some of the other ideas I have.)

Sigh. Just grasping for some measure of the immortality promised me in my youth, I suppose. Or maybe the desire to live on forever precedes that, just a natural human view of time?

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It's your legs.

The quote is about how to stand when playing trumpet. (Referenced in this instructional video)

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From another direction he felt the sensation of being a sheep startled by a flying saucer, but it was virtually indistinguishable from the feeling of being a sheep startled by anything else it ever encountered, for they were creatures who learned very little on their journey through life, and would be startled to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by all the green stuff in the fields.

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RIP Toni Morrison. I took all the African-American literature courses in college I could in order to double up on English and World Culture credits, and so got to enjoy a ton of great stuff. What a voice.

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Paul D sits down in the rocking chair and examines the quilt patched in carnival colors. His hands are limp between his knees. There are too many things to feel about this woman. His head hurts. Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman. "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."