I think I know what it is I am afraid of. No wonder I couldn’t explain it to the therapist. I could not explain it to myself.
There are no alternate versions of me floating about. Not yet. Some day there will be. It comes back to memory, the inelegance of its decay, and its future place in technology.
I’ve said in years past that the searchies will, sooner or later, run out of content to index. Every PDF, every encyclopedia, every page of every book ever published will be gobbled up, scanned, indexed, cross-indexed, ultra-indexed and then indexed again with a new and exciting but confidential blend of algorithmic panache. All that will be left is the dull and relatively minuscule trickle of daily news content.
When this happens the search will be on for human consciousness. Our memories and thoughts will be catalogued, taxonomized, processed and reprocessed, and ultimately made to look wholly unremarkable. What we today consider to be the magic of talent or the spark of creativity will be reduced to a line of code. Eccentricities and uniquenesses? Pshaw, coders have all that at their fingerteats, ripened as taste and seasoned to maximized monetization.
That is where I get scared. Everyone should. Because your memories will be out there, as will mine. Every lie that anyone has told themselves about you will float into the public domain as fact. The warped and the righteous images people have of you and of others among us will be indexed, ranked, and algorithmically sorted such that everything about you will be tossed into a salad bowl and mashed together indiscriminately. The hallucinagenic vision your college roommate had of you buttfucking a rooster will wash up into your vanity searches the same as your curated LinkedIn profile where you seek to portray yourself as a captain of industry. The lies your ex-boyfriends told others about you will, by their sheer quantity and distribution, paint an image of you that is altogether false but, according to the algorithm, inarguably correct. Lies told today that fade into irrelevance depending to whom they are told become singularly poisonous when that inter-human communion is erased and they (the lies) are ranked primarily on their quantity. Even the most storied and carefully sculpted images of the world’s most famous idolized will come slithering down into this abyss of lies.
…
OK, then. I hope to stand by that little eureka moment (moments I do not think exist) until I let it percolate into caffeinated splendor.
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OCMR 2866
Today I did some rearranging at the storage room. Between the 2 hours at the 21st Street Library and checking in here at the Broadway library I went to the storage facility where I rented a room several years ago. I rented the room after I got mugged, out of some amount of fear that the muggers had made off with my drivers license and might therefore decide to break in to my place and obliterate my precious valuables into their possession. It was also just some common sense. I put a few items in that locker that would be extremely useful in certain circumstances, but there is nothing of any value.
I happened to spot a box from my college days. That was funny. Hiding behind the Lego Mindstorms box (why do I even still have that?) I saw the familiar “OCMR (Oberlin College Mail Room) 2866”. somehow 2866 never instantiated itself as a magic number in my life, even though I was something like the envy of other students there for conspicuous quantities of packages I got delivered there. It seemed to be a thing, getting packages. It made me feel important.
But the number, as best I can recall, has never appeared again. Not in a phone number, not on a license plate, not on a slot machine. If it showed up anywhere I simply do not recall.
My plan is to move a portion of boxes from my bedroom into the storage room. The boxes contain old music magazines, most of which I have digitized in whole or in part. I don’t exactly crave the free space that ridding my room of those boxes would open. That is not the point of this. The point of this is that if the angry landlord calls the cops on me or puts eviction papers on my door than I want to be able to move on as quickly and easily as possible. I should pare down my clutter anyway, although the magazines are not what I consider clutter. They are not valuable at all. If I just dumped every last one of them into the rubbish I don’t think it would rack my soul too deeply.
I could end up just renting a second room, or moving the stuff from this one to another larger one. It’s gotten stupidly expensive at that place, and it’s not as if any greater value comes from paying more for this space.
One cluster of items in the locker that started to overwhelm me was the receipts. Thousands upon thousands, I hoarded them since time immemorial thinking they would never take up too much space. Boy oh boy… Someday when I get assassinated and my crap washes up on one of those pickers TV shows then someone will get rich off my ephemera.
I left a copy of the Manhattan phone book at a thrift shop today. I randomly went through the pages and circled names of businesses, writing things like “NO!” and “I AM CONCERNED” near them. I also stamped several of the pages with my WSBJ.com stamp, and the sorabji.com one that says “I WANT TO LIVE FOREVER.” I keep intending to print up zillions of little stickers and scraps of paper with either pithy maxims or my web site URLs on them, so I can deposit them in library books and wherever is clever. The pithy maxims would be unique to my web sites. So if anyone found them even remotely intriguing they might look them up, find my web site, and fall in love with this bedraggled middle aged loser.
