Not much time to type, and not much to say anyway. I shared with someone the opening line of my autobiography:

My grandfather was a sewer cleaner. Granny was a cunt.

It’s true on both counts. The challenge is to unravel the relevance these two points have on how I turned out as a growed up. Maybe none. I never knew my grandfather. He became a truck driver later but the 1940 census shows his occupation as a sewer cleaner. I never knew his name until looking for it on ancestry.com. I can’t remember his name now. Chris? Who cares… I looked it up thinking my sister would be interested. It was she who had to tell whoever field our mother’s death certificate that her (our mother’s) father was “UNKNOWN”.

If anything I am something of a genealogical sociopath. I’ve never found much intrigue or interest in tree tracing, at least not for my lineage. Maybe it’s a means of compensating for repressed guilt that I did so much work for others as a forensic genealogist, which is just a fancy term for cemetery photographer. That was exciting and satisfying work when it worked out the way it was supposed to.

I remember finding a cemetery in eastern Colorado. I guess this was 2002. My mother had me thinking that a forebear of hers was buried at that cemetery. I was mistaken. I went out there and got a shot of somebody’s burial site but whoever that was had but a distantly anecdotal connection to anyone we knew or knew of. It was my fault for getting it wrong but I think about it now for the first time since that happened and try to remember if I had any enthusiasm for this search. My mother’s mother was from … somewhere in eastern Colorado, can’t think of the town’s name now. Was it Greeley? I tried to find pictures of stuff like the houses she lived in or the schools she went to but everything had changed since her day.

My mother’s sister came to Tampa after their mother died. She made it clear to me that her visit had nothing to do with showing her respects for her mother, who she repeatedly described as a despicable human being who screwed our mother badly. She came as a peace offering to my mother, since it was their mother who had driven them apart years earlier with a massive squall of lies.

Hmm, this is nice shit to think about.

…

I boxed up the cassettes and put them away, hopefully forever. It’s amazing to think that all those hours of sound, at just under 100GB, will fit on a tiny flash drive with plenty of room to spare. I remember Allan, the Apology guy, grousing about how his life’s work (by which he meant the audio library of Apology calls) could fit on a single CD. He must have been using the RealAudio format to get that kind of compression. Hah, he would have been locked into a proprietary format such that he loathed.

I don’t know which is more depressing: That one’s entire output could be metaphorically reduced to such a small slab of plastic, or that Allan considered amassing all those calls to be his lie’s work. Hah, meant to say “life’s work’ but will leave it as ‘lie’s”, since that is so much of Apology was filled with. God hath no love for the life made of lies. But simply amassing that stuff and not really doing anything with it just seems like more of a start than an accomplishment. Like I should talk…. We did make that magazine but I wonder if that or anything else about Apology had the capacity to change anyone’s life or even make an impression?

And also: Lies work. They really do.

Going to read Notes from the Underground since seeing that Joe Frank said he can relate to many of the characters therein. Can’t remember if I ever read that.

Think I’ll walk up to Staple’s and see if they have any deals on cheapo 128gb flash drives.