I meant to be asleep soon as my clothes were folded, but thoughts keep me awake

[crankyoldman]

As much as I believe I will never be famous (or want to, and I find such ambitions silly) or otherwise need to have my life recorded for any purpose, I'm still pretty obsessed with memory. I'm pretty sure it's genetic too, since my grandfather had more photographs than any person I had ever seen, put into carefully labeled binders. My obsession with a personal history is nearly all electronic these days. Carefully archived writing, pictures sorted, hard-coded music library; backed up to an external harddrive if my computer crashes. Twitter, Livejournal, Facebook, and various other places online also serve as archives.

On this day, I woke up. On that, I called my professor a douche. On the next I babbled about rockets.

Most is shit that doesn't matter, or shit that only a few people see. The things I keep in the box on the tallest shelf never are seen by anyone. Most of my grandfather's photographs will probably be thrown out, there's just too many for the scatterings of the family to find as important as he did. And I'm sure he knew this as he put them together, carefully typing out the labels for the years with two fingers on a typewriter.

For likely different reasons, we went to all this trouble to leave behind some... proof of existence. On the days when the parts of me that are still a little crazy (because I did go crazy, that's a fact, not an excuse or fishing for sympathy) like to disconnect my reason and my emotion from the physical world and leave me so... out there, I have some proof that yes, I exist. It's right there, in print, in pictures, in the detrus of years as imprints.

Weird what things are really comforting sometimes.

Comments

[drakonlily.livejournal.com]

My great grandmother told me that the true measure of yourself is who you leave behind. Emotions are less fleeting than people sometimes... not sure where I'm going with this, just saying the sentiment touched me.