Something, Something

Originally, I was going to write an explanation for why I haven't touched this place in nearly ten days. And then I remembered this is my own private blog on my own personal site, and that really is unnecessary. And boring. So, instead, I'm going to talk about the effort to preserve things in a more conceptual and emotional way than a practical one.

My 2nd favourite poem isn't a poem at all, but a quote from 'The Blind Eye: A Book Of Late Advice' by Don Paterson. Here is the text: "Experiments in attachment. My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband. I meet him in the cafe; he looks terrible - his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot... He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listening to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar... He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die."

This, more than anything else, summarises what motivates people to collect and safeguard information. At least, in my eyes It's love (a word I'm using with a terrible amount of option about its meaning), it's devotion, it's a devastating sort of nostalgia. You begin with something you have personal attachment to - a tv show that only aired locally, an unreleased album heard only in snippets, a commercial nobody remembers but you and your friend - something you want to be found for your sake. And you fall utterly in love with the search, with the people you meet with their own special mysteries, with the community built around saving something trivial from obscurity. You love the dedication to what might only matter to a handful of people on earth, or to hundreds. It's no longer just about what you're looking for, but the fact you're looking for it at all. You spend hours upon hours of your life uploading old youtube videos and deviantart comics (that was my first siren song :3) and song covers to the Internet Archive, and it does feel good! To know that if somebody else comes looking for this, you've made sure they'll find it. It consumes you. Don't get me wrong; it's exhausting, it's near-pointless sometimes, it's likely to keep you up at night with the fear of wondering how much is lost for good. It's worth it. If you're going to have any bad habit, I think you can do a lot worse than caring too much. We all need hobbies.