I was reading an article in The New Yorker not long ago about Gordon Bell’s project to record every single aspect of his life electronically, along with related material (like maps). I was aghast: Why would anyone do such a thing? Who would be interested in seeing it? If anyone else was interested, wouldn’t that person be too busy chronicling his or her own life? For instance, I can’t go see his archive because I have to spend half an hour now and then doing my blog.
You have an experience that takes five minutes to have. You make a DVD of it, which takes three hours. Watching the DVD takes fifteen minutes (allowing for turning the apparatus on and off). That’s three hours and fifteen minutes during which no new experience will be had, unless you count the experience of creating the DVD and watching it; perhaps the making of a documentary film can be undertaken to capture that part.
Honestly, after I read that, for a moment, I felt like deleting my blog and never recording anything again. As for my journal per se, I find very little occasion to write anything new in it now that this blog exists, so I’m actually thinking of getting rid of it, all thirty years’ worth. It’s not that everything I do or think is recorded here—far from it—but it should be enough to jog my memory, and it seems entirely to satisfy my impulse to record and describe.
When would a person who is trying to live in the moment have time to read an account of three of her own previous decades, anyway? Might I want to read it if I’m in a nursing home someday with plenty of time on my hands?
Presumably, either I can remember past events I took part in without notes (say, one percent of them), or they are events that have so completely disappeared from my memory (the other ninety-nine percent), it would be like reading someone else’s journal, which I don’t have time to do (unless it’s the journal of one of my parents; I’d make time for that).
I think I used to fear that I would somehow lose part of myself if I lost my journal, but I don’t think I fear that anymore. After all, there are billions of people who never kept a journal in the first place.
Lately I’ve been getting rid of something or other from my filing cabinets nearly every day, most recently a stack of dreams I wrote down when I was in high school, for dream interpretation class. I saved one, though I didn’t need to save even that one, since I remember it now and then out of the blue anyway. It’s about having a mostly bald scalp with a countable numbers of hairs sticking out of it, each of which is about an eighth of a inch in diameter.
I’m trying to be much more ruthless about email, too, not saving so much of it. I often check it using the web client, but sometimes I use Outlook Express, which shows me anything I didn’t already delete online.
Last weekend, I knew I had about six undeleted emails, and couldn’t figure out why thirty emails appeared when I started Outlook Express. It was because I had forgotten to check my second-most-important email address, which I had forgotten existed! I couldn’t believe it. Maybe it’s not Alzheimer’s per se, but I can’t remember anything anymore.
Some websites lately have you choose or enter questions whose answers will help in authentication. Recently I came upon one of mine that was “Frank’s favorite drink.” Obviously, I have no idea what Frank’s favorite drink is. Or was that a joke? Did it refer to the time I handed him a bottle of Gatorade whose cap wasn’t entirely on and Gatorade sloshed down his front? (Now, THAT was funny.) I couldn’t remember the word “Gatorade,” either; all I could think was “orangeade,” along with a little worry about whether that’s actually how it’s spelled. In the end, I had to call tech support.
I’ve started to write instructions right on the thing they’re for, in case I can’t remember where else the instructions might be. I’m picturing a tattoo on someone’s forehead of the words “Comb this” with an arrow pointing up to his or her hair.
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