Fire-and-Forget Memories

So, a lot of people I know write stuff online. They write on LiveJournal. They write on Blogger/BlogSpot. They write on Twitter. They write on FaceBook. They write on any of dozens of other sites. Many, like me, frequently choose to write about things both personal/private and more mundane "public" stuff. However, I wonder if the people that write all this stuff are like me in why they write.

For me, writing online is about preserving memories. Part of preserving memories is going back and periodically reviewing things. For me, it can act as a grounding-force. I can tell whether the high/low/whatever of the current moment is normal, an aberation or part of some kind of a pattern. It can help me remember - or even just refresh - the character, the feeling or flavor of the things written about. It can also remind me of "promises" I've made to myself and to see how well I've done in those.

A big part of why I scatter my writings in so many places (and make the vast majority findable by search engines) is so that they don't become lost. If one site goes away, I don't lose an entire chunk of memories - of my life. To me, what I've written for myself is critical.

As I do with my own writings, I sometimes look back through things friends have written. Sometimes it's just a random perusal. Sometimes it's with a purpose. Sadly, it seems that in a non-trivial number of cases, people write things so that they can get them off their chest ...and then summarily forget them. It makes me wonder, why they're committing it to "Internet Memory" at all? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to write it on a piece of paper and then just burn it? Or, for that matter, why write it down at all? Introspection absent review isn't really introspection.

I swear: the longer I'm around and the more I interact with - or even merely observe - people, the less I understand them.

Milestones of Aging

I dunno why, but, tonight, it suddenly occurred to me, "people born in 1990 will be legal to drink this year". It was a realization that made me feel old. It made me feel old, in part, because it means that, in just shy of one year, there will be kids in the US taking their first legal drinks who weren't even born, yet, when I took my first legal drink.

There's a lot of commonly recognized age milestones in life. For someone born in the US, those are typically things like:

• Turning 16 and being allowed to drive (though, it seems that's getting delayed in some states)
• Turning 18 and being allowed to vote, sign contracts, be tried as an adult (without special legal considerations)
• Turning 21 and being allowed to drink
• Turning 25 and being able to rent a car by yourself (and, in many cases starting on the downhill curve of auto insurance rates)
• Turning 30 ...because you're now "over the hill"
• Turning 55 and, at least according to AARP, joining the ranks of "senior citizens"
• Turning whatever age you're eligible to start receiving Social Security

In addition to these, there are also other less well recognized milestones. These are the kinds of milestones that make you say, "fuck: I'm getting old".

• The first time you open up a Playboy and realize, "I'm older than the Playmate of the Month".
• Remembering sneaking your dad's porn mags when you were a kid looking for porn
• When you get hit by a driver who wasn't even born when you first got your drivers license.
• Looking around, at a concert or nightclub, and being astonished at the younger elements of the crowd being old enough to drink
• Realizing that the T-shirt you're wearing is older than some of the adults in the room
• Having the original versions of several of the T-shirt being hawked by Hot Topic (et. al.)
• Watching a sporting event where the teams are wearing their "throwback" uniforms and remembering when those were the uniforms were current
• Realizing that the "underground" music you love(d) is now twenty or more years old
• Realizing that the band Tshirt some kid is wearing was from a band who's lead-singer (etc.) died before that kid was even born.
• Realizing that so many of the things that are "retro-cool" were things you grew up with or came of age with.
• When your first relative dies of natural causes
• When your first parent dies of natural causes
• When your first peer dies of natural causes
• Realizing that you've been working for a living for nearly two decades ...and that you still have two (or more) decades yet left to work.

There's tons more. It seems I discover more and more of them each day. And, for better or worse, there's many I won't get to experience (e.g., unlike my mother, I'll never have the sobering realization of having a child who's 30, or 40 or has just reached retirement-age).

Lonliness

I don't know that you can, in the strictest sense of the feeling, say that the sense of isolation and disconnectedness that I feel, on a nearly constant basis, is "loneliness". It's simply a recognition that I don't feel very well connected to my fellow man. I don't feel like there's anyone out there that truly gets or understands me. Hell, I'm not sure that even I do, fully, I'm just the closest to someone who does.

When my dad first died, the most salient thought was "the one person with whom I could actually really talk and who 'got me' has died". That was a lonely, empty feeling. That said, in the months since he's died, and, in particular, this past father's day weekend, it struck me that that initial feeling wasn't quite accurate. It wasn't so much that my dad 'got me' as much as he was of a similar enough mental makeup that he was closer to getting me than anyone else I've know. I've realized that he probably didn't really get me, he just came close. The source of this realization being that, much as we were similar, I didn't really know my dad.

While I've never had a sense of having a place to call "home", my dad apparently felt that Mahanoy City, PA was his "home." I'm not certin, however, that even that's quite accurate. If my dad truly was of a similar mental outlook to me, then no place was really home because there was no one, anywhere, who really knew him. Mahanoy City was just some place he could hang his head on as an idea of "home".