tonight i felt melancholy, and too tired to go to bed. you see, i spent the bulk of the night at malibu grand prix, where i spent dollars and dollars of other people’s money on house of the dead 2, jurassic park, star wars: pod racer, cruisin usa: exotica [?], and skee-ball. you might wonder (a) why i was at an arcade, (b) who i was there with, and (c) why i was spending other people’s money. these are all valid questions of course, but i don’t feel like answering them.
the point is that any night full of shooting lasers at zombies, and full of going for the 100,000 hole in skee-ball (with zombie-like tenacity), is bound to be a night of deep questioning, soul-searching, and identity-seeking. and what better method for searching than google? you see, it occasionally occurs to me to wonder who i am, how i am identified, and such. i am sure questions like these occur to most people a good deal of the time, but i am blessedly unperturbed by them for the most part. still, there are moments where i would wish to examine my roots, revisit the history of my life, trace out the pattern of my growth–essentially, to assure myself that i am not disconnected from my own history, and that the narrative of my life is unfolding in a meaningful and acceptable way.
roots, however, are notoriously hard for me to come by. where am i from? not california. not florida. texas? maybe. maybe not. papua new guinea? i wish i could say yes, but i can’t, on pain of posing. arizona? probably not. which are my childhood streets? there were so many…
of course, i jealously regard my childhood as the best imaginable, and the multiple moves as pre-requisite to a fuller understanding of culture and the world. so in the end i can’t be frustrated with the situation. and i’m not. still, it makes my past more hazy to me–more mysterious. less accessible by car or phone. all my pre-collegiate friends, from 1st grade on, are thousands of miles away. so who is there with me, keeping an eye on who i’m becoming? no one.
so it becomes necessary for me to go back periodically…to engage in the equivalent of looking over old scrapbooks and what have you. tonight i opened up microsoft outlook and went to my e-mail archive. i am fastidious about the storing and organizing of e-mails, so in a moment’s time i was reading the oldest e-mails still on my computer. as it happens, i have every e-mail ever received or sent by me since exactly 4 years ago. before that, alas, i was not so concerned with saving such information (all too precious, little that i knew) and the memoirs of my early internet days remain lost, forever unable to be teased piecemeal out of correspondence.
luckily, enough was left from before the move to florida that i felt sufficiently transported into the past. i was slightly shocked by what i read: my words were so very different, and yet so very alike, to what i would write now. the attempted wit and sarcasm were very much there, but it seemed so young, so un-cynical. i was less wise, and also less foolish at the same time (if you think this is impossible, you are wrong: i sense both growing in me every day, to my frustration).
i pored over e-mails to and from old friends with whom i haven’t spoken, in some cases, since those very letters were written. it became addictive, drug-like…i couldn’t get enough of the words of the previous selves of my friends, and the words with which my previous self responded, sometimes after having been painstakingly constructed to impress, to delight, to woo, to influence, to control…
clearly, the past is a powerful thing. powerfully dangerous, of course: nothing is easier than becoming mired in it. but powerfully instructive. i hope that these old e-mails will continue to exist, as they age like good wine, ripe for the tasting of my 40-year old self. how much wisdom will i have then? probably not so much that i couldn’t learn still from the advice of my friends and myself: age 16. a digital time capsule, if you will.
but i ramble. the excursion into the former days inspired me to look up old friends and see what they were up to. hence the reference to google earlier. thanks to its speedy algorithms i now know, in some cases with surprising detail, what a number of my friends from texas are doing, where they are going to school, etc… and though i didn’t speak with any of these friends, or connect with them in any real way, i feel as if i did connect in some sense, as i was reminded that they continued living their lives after i left. this comes as a shock to me every so often–that people move and think and grow when i am not looking at them. it’s a scary and humbling thought, really.
of course, the decision to extend the night further and write about this melancholy has taken some of the sweetness out of the past’s draught. reminiscing is very certainly one of those things that must be done, not talked about, for it to have any use. and now i have destroyed its gift. but it is not a loss without some recompense, for some day, possibly years from now, i may read this entry and come to realize some important thing about myself through it. which is, of course, exactly what has been under discussion. so it is no doubt a reasonable expectation.
but it’s damn late. good night.
