12 / 31 / 2009
All systems back online. Except that guy.
I love memory lane. It's a sacred place where only you are allowed entry. A place that not only allows reflection of oneself, but the re-aligning with a completely different person that was you, once. I'm not talking about recalling small details from three years ago as you wash the dishes; I mean a genuine, harmless trip down memory lane that unearths itself just for you when you're probably not expecting it to. Like finding an old box of your stuff in the attic and having all of your senses attune to specific periods of time when these posessions had more than just sentimental value.
Now that Christmas has passed and New Year's is here, I thought of no better time than now to begin a major clean-out for my drives and organizing my files better. For those who don't know me, I've been a regular internet user for probably close to eleven years. And I'm a pack rat. A huge fucking pack rat - until last night. A lot of the files I've been deleting are anywhere from two to eight years old, and it's amazing how almost liberating it feels to just get rid of crap that there's no way you could use anymore.
I guess you could also look at it as 'letting go of the past' or something, but that seems like a bit much for me. The closest I got to that was when I deleted all of my IM logs. It's so weird to read a conversation between you and somebody else that you were really close to and knew for a long time, then do the math and realize it's been half of a decade since you've even communicated with them. I had tens of thousands of these because my messenger logs every single conversation of mine. Entire friendships, some that lasted years, documented from beginning to end in complete verbatim that catalogued every date and time that we spoke - how's that for data management?
And now they're all gone. 2 gigabytes of plain text that was exchanged between me about 200 other people over a tenth of century has been erased forever and will never be read again. In hindsight, I don't know why I kept them around for so long. I didn't even read them except in rare instances of boredom when I'd remember I still had them. Sure, an archive of all correspondance might come in handy if I worked for the government, but for day-to-day chit-chat? I really was a different person last year.
It hasn't taken as long as I thought it would to clean house. All that's left to go through are the web design folders, emulation folders and... the music. Damn, the music. Oh yeah! I am in posession of a bitchin' new set of speakers, as well as a great studio microphone and some headphones on the way. Maybe after three years of doing this, I'll finally make a song with some lead vocals. Who knows?
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