blargblog
An expulsive extension of
Last night I read an investigative report which said, in short, that home-recordable compact discs are useless for archival purposes, as the dyes they employ to record digital information fade within as short a span as two years, shorter if exposed to light on a regular or extended basis. This news made me quite angry and upset, as I have a great number of recordable CDs full of everything from personal photographs to audio and video recordings of obscure British comedy. My collection of full, 650 and 700 megabyte discs is currently somewhere between 3,000-4,000 CDs, and now I have to face the task of deciding which ones to preserve from self-destruction within the next year, taking into consideration the time and expense required to transfer them to some as-yet-to-be-determined format.
This dilemma raised certain larger questions and concepts in my mind which soon had me floating on a stupefying waterslide of cosmic boggle. Why had I wasted so much time collecting the material on these CDs? Should I spend even more time, effort, and money moving these evaporating digital possessions to a more permanent format when my own mind, the very personality which has sought to collect this material, is itself stored on fast-decaying flesh? How am I using my time on earth? How should I be using it? Why have I felt this compulsion to collect books, music, video, as if I was accomplishing something that meant anything, when it obviously doesn't, when we are all dying, when the material we collect is dying, when the planet we and our possessions ride is itself dying, in wobbly orbit about a dying sun in a dying galaxy in a dying universe?
I have acted as an amateur librarian through most of my adult life, collecting about me as much of the media which has struck me as emotionally important as I could financially afford to get my hands on. But, cash aside, could I really afford that investment? What price has this hoarding of stored emotion exerted on my life? While I spent time and money collecting the complete recordings of radio comedians Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, I was simultaneously consoling myself for and ensuring the absence of friends, lovers, excitement, any sort of meaning at all in my pitifully vacant life. Every moment I spent compiling lists of books or music to buy, I was waking up alone, meaning nothing to no one, living in a limbo of lowered expectations, sucking emotion vicariously and feverishly through the cold digital tit of recordings of others living their own lives, or living pretend lives for a paycheck. My body has withered and bloated as I've sat pawing books and watching films and listening to obscure music. My body is a dying shell of maltreated meat, whose biological imperatives beyond food and sleep have largely been ignored, their satisfaction too painful to contemplate after a lifetime of unmitigated failure to mean anything to any woman I have ever cared for. And my chosen means of making up for this deficit is now shown up for the sham it's always been, thanks to the boys and girls at the recordable CD factories!
My recent purchase of The Complete Far Side, a mammoth two-tome compendium of expired mirth, is an absurd, laughable compensation for the joy of feeling a woman's hand holding mine and hearing her tell me I mean something, that my life has added up to something worth a woman's love. Fuck The Complete Far Side. Why did I spend my money on this garbage? I applaud Gary Larsen for having lived a worthwhile life and achieved something, a faded copy of which I now own, but where do I get off trying to live vicariously through Gary Larsen's accomplishments by buying this wood pulp tombstone to my own faded childhood dreams of happiness, of that joy that seeing Larsen's cartoons in my parents' daily newspaper once gave me, at the thought that maybe I could someday make someone else happy from time to time in the way those cartoons did for me?
We are all dying. And it's beautiful. It's beautiful because it is the heat-seeking slap in the face that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are trying valiantly to avoid with their worldly conquests and accomplishments, a grim rebuke that's guaranteed to knock them on their fascist asses with finality and grace. They can take thousands of other Americans and Iraqis with them to their graves, but they can do nothing to change the fact that their schemes and their dreams are dying with them and any mark they leave on this dying earth will go with them to the tomb. Day by day they and their life-denying plans are collapsing from within, gnawed by worms, and they are helpless to stop it. This is what we must all remember. Our time on Earth is short. It is only through tricking us into accepting unacceptable compromises through illusions of safety that these idiots can control our lives. But none of us is safe. We each have somewhere between zero and a hundred years on this dying world to eat, drink, fuck, and croak. We are all going to die. We must always remember this, so that we are not fooled into betraying our lives by deluded madmen. The Patriot Act cannot protect us from death. But it can dramatically demean those short years we have on earth, steal from us the beauty of free lives. We must fight these people who seek to make a mockery of life. We must fight the forces in our own minds which seek to delude us into betraying ourselves.
Or not. It's your choice, my choice. Either way we choose, we're all going to die. And it's beautiful. If there is someone in your life that you love reach out and hug them and kiss them and tell them you love them. This is all we have. This love, the feeling of the touch of a loved one's hand, the smile of a friend after a day of dealing with idiots, the small joys of sharing our lives with those we care for. Do not forget it. Stay true to what matters, and let the nonsense fall away. For the nonsense is dying and we are dying and it is all so god-damned beautiful.