Does anyone besides yourself remember the name of your math teacher when you were 15 years old? Do YOU even remember his/her name?
Moreover, who the fuck cares?
Well, I for one think YOU do. If you were killed in a car crash tomorrow, how much of your life and everything you did in it would get totally obliterated, just like your slowly-festering corpse?
And like I said — you probably don’t think anyone alive today could possibly give a shit what your math teacher’s name was or whether or not you did well in his/her class or any one of a trillion details of your life — YOUR life, not anyone else’s — and of course, why should they? They have enough trouble getting the details of their OWN adolescence straight, let alone someone else’s.
My problem is, sure, no one SHOULD be expected to gve a shit. After all, you’re still kicking around, just a phone call or an email away. No need to know these things, to ever HAVE to know these things, because they’re so insignificant in the Grand Scheme of Things, what with Al Qaeda burgeoning through the Dune Belt in Africa and ruining everyone’s day, the Boston Marathon Bombing (holy cow, Batman! Boston! Quick, summon the Teaparty Mobile!)
But what happens when you, and the trillions or so neurons that hold the memory of yes, what you had for breakfast on January 8th, 1987, just get erased, like the data in the clumsy spilling of a pint of beer onto your fully-running laptop?
All of a sudden, even if for whatever reason, someone WANTS to know the name of your math teacher at Las Lomas High in the spring of 1974, that information simply is no longer available. That information, folks, has disappeared forever, not there, folks, the party is over and you can all go home now. Unless, of course, the person wanting the info can hire a private detective or painstakingly do the research himself of writing to the school and asking them to consult their records blah blah blah. — a rather large hassle, I’d say, compared to just consulting a digital database of your memoirs with a search string of “math+teacher+1975” or even “schools 1975” or what have you.
But if such a database did not EXIST, mind you, in any form — a handwritten diary, a snippet of videotape from graduation of ‘77 — then it’s gone forever.
So what, you ask, perfectly reasonably. No one, yourself included, needs to know what you had for dinner on Jan 19th, 1987. But I have a question: where WERE you on January 18th, 1987?
What did you DO on that day?
Now, not being a squarish diarist, recording a little of what I did that day — and believe me, there are a LOT more people like that than you can imagine — I might be able to place around WHERE I was that day, as in, what country, probably what state and what city, but as I sit here in 2013, I really couldn’t tell you what street I was living on on that day. I know from a process of elimination — where I WASN’T — where I probably was on that day, even the street, and I could, based on my recollections from that general period of my life, come up with a reasonably accurate summary of what I probably was doing that day, but I’d probably be off by miles on most of the fine details.
I’d be able to tell you what car I was driving at the time — that’s easy — but I can’t even remember whether or not I was involved with anyone at the time, and if I was, who that might have been. Not that I had so many girlfriends it’s all a fog of war — indeed, exactly the opposite — but as far as I know, I was not involved with anyone at the time.
Now wouldn’t it be nice if someone came up to you — we’re talking about YOU, now — and told you, down to the minute, what you did, where you were, what you ate and what you drank, who you spoke to during the course of the day, your telephone number and exact address at the time — wouldn’t that be just great? No? Okay, maybe it wouldn’t, but I’d be at least curious. In fact, armed with that day’s information, I’d be able to piece together the shape of the whole month, more or less, and maybe recall stuff that I haven’t thought of, well, since that very day.
Now imagine if you could nail your parents down to, say, the third month of your mother’s pregnancy with you. What were they doing at the time? Was your mother smoking and drinking? (in my case, I know that answer — regrettably, YES.) Who were they hanging around with? What records were on the turntable? (they were in Calcutta, India, and had no radio or television — only vinyl LPs and a large mono record player).
Now that’s great, but imagine if you could somehow know what your GRANDMOTHER was doing on the third day of the third month she was pregnant with your father, say.
I don’t even have to guess the answer. You have no idea, and have no idea how you would go about getting that information. If your father is still alive, at least he could nail down where his mother probably WAS on that day, but any further than that, and he’d draw a complete blank. And if you father isn’t around any more, well, just forget about any of it.
I don’t even know what my father’s mother’s first name was, or what her family name was before she married my grandfather. I don’t remember my father’s father at all. I may never have met him. I don’t know hat his first name was, although I can pretty much be assured his last name was Robinson.
And HE was probably born in the 1800s . . . my father was born in 1922, so there’s a good chance his parents were both born in the 1800s. That’s like, a seriously LONG TIME AGO.
But he’s not around to tell me any of this. My mother may know all of this. Indeed, I am going to Califrnia on May 1 with the express purpose of setting up a camcorder every single of the five full days I will be there, and grill my mother about as much as I can get out of her. Because she is 85 years old, and I know that I will probably never get this chance again.
Luckily — VERY luckily, in retrospect, although I can also say it wasn’t luck, it was because I was smart — at the beginning of the 2000s I sat my father down and got at least six good hours of videotape out of him about his life, his parents, his upbringing, how he met my mother — and even HE had the foresight to take a stack of old Con Aereo/Par Avion aerogrammes written by my mother from various places back in the late 50s and early 60s to my father, and he sat down and typed out every single one of them. I believe it comes out to around 10 binders of about 40 pages each. I will OCR them (optical-character-recognition) them and get them into digital form, then get my father’s voice from all those tapes into a written (digital) format, then add what my mother is going to say, then maybe scan all the 50 or so photo albums hanging around my mother’s house and then create a monster database for my descendants.
Can you imagine what a huge gift that will be to them? And to the memory of all those of my family who are now pushing up daisies and have been in some cases, for over 100 years?
I’ve also taken the what used to be unheard-of step of having myself genotyped through an outfit called 23andme.com, which should provide a DNA rough lineage of my paternal and maternal lines going back who knows how far . . . plus provide a medical database of sorts that will remain even if I get hit by a truck tomorrow (I don’t think that while doing the funeral arrangements, my family would think to have my DNA sequenced, but if I were you, I’d put it into my living will, especially considering that it can now be done for around $100).
At any rate, when I’m ashes to ashes, my son will have a massive gift to keep with him . . . personal diaries that I’m keeping, video diaries that I’m also keeping (about one minute a day’s summary of recent events taken by my computer camera and placed in a folder called “Videodiaries”) plus whatever else I can create or get my hands on before the next Rapture/Resurrection/Alien unveiling . . . hopefully in a nice, neat little package that wouldn’t be so out of place next to the stuff they put into that box that went along with Voyager 1, which I think has just passed through the Heliopause . . .
Of course, I will have no presidents singing my praises but I might get Lulu to miaow once or twice. That should be enough for the eight-limbed wingless parasitic entities that humans will be evolving into in the next 500,000 years or so to crack a Boréale Dry and sit around the Lasertron reminiscing while looking at holograms of me playing “Stairway to Dubrovnik” on my 43-stringed guitarkoto that I hope I’ll be able to afford when I become 120 or so.
And what preparations for YOUR descendants will YOU have been making, if I might be so bold?
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