Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Did I Really Write That?

One of my favorite Simpsons epidoses is a parody of Stephen King's The Shining, in which Marge, hoping to figure out if Homer is going to murder everyone in their sleep, decides that "what he's typed will be a window into his madness." I offer the YouTube clip here:



Occasionally, when I read this blog, especially the old entries -- and I have to call them old because, taking the Internet into consdieration, April 15, 2009 IS old -- and occasionally when I read my journal, which, since it stretches back to the year 1993, is ANCIENT per Internet standards, I get a peek into my own madness.

Cultural anthropologists ought to have a field day with the Internet in, say, 30 or 50 years if we don't suffer the same fate as GeoCities. Of course, I'm sure there's someone out there catalogging and archiving the terabushels of crap that the Intertubes produces, so maybe containment and storage of the beast will be one of the specials of the future. This is why I archive my stuff as PDFs every month or so, becuse for posterity to have to live without my Internet remblings would be a sad thing, indeed.

It's a wonder, this Internet thing. In a small way, it's allowing the common man to leave his mark on society in a way that, in the past, has been matched only by graffiti. Yes indeed, not since the days of the scribbling on the walls of Lascaux has the ordinary man been able to leave his mark on society and know for certain that it would be available for the Men of the Future to read, even if 1) The Men of the Future didn't really care to read what's written, 2) It was overwritten by other Men of the Past, or 3) It consists mainly of things like "Me too!" "LOL," or [Insert snotty and gramatically poor invective on religion, politics or the Great Pumpkin here].

Who, for example, is going to care about this (taken from a journal entry of 4 June 2009):
I am such a geek. Part of my onerous preparation for our trip to Oregon is making sure my blogs can handle my being on the road. Yes, you heard right, I’m worried about keeping things updated. That sounds so weird. The Cokesbury Party Blog I’ve got ready to run on autopilot while I’m gone, so I don’t have to bring the book with me. Mister Fweem’s Blog I’ll just update on the road. Whee. Nerd that I am. Because I can’t disappoint my audience. Which consists mostly of me and my brother-in-law Carl. So why do I do it? Because it’s the thrill of owning my own printing press without getting my fingers dirty.
Having read it again, I'm not sure I even care about it, and I wrote it. But it was so important at the time. And so nonsensical. But that pretty much sums up the Internet, right? Thing is, my brother-in-law isn't even reading this blog any more. He's got a teriffic excuse: He's given up blogging himself in order to write his doctoral thesis, which has something to do with Syriac languages. Don't ask me what, because I don't remember. But I might read it. Might be fun. Might be more interesting than reading what I've written.

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