Post from the past

I have no idea how I was doing on the 15th of August, but it must not have been very well, because I found this nestled deep in our drafts pile:

George the Third on a tricycle, what the hell was I thinking? This is a happy blog. It is an irreverent blog. It is not a blog for emo postings (we are, however, more than happy to host emu omu postings). Therefore we must be happy and irreverent and most of all snarky. Was the last post any of that? I think not.

And then it peters out, and the mystery roars into life. What was the entry in question? And why was I so upset?

I suppose I could end it quickly by running to our archives for the post made just before 15/08/10, but that would be too much of a killjoy. Isn't that why we're keeping this blog, though? To be a killjoy To keep little bits and pieces of the past alive for future recollection? Us humans, we have terrible memories. Vast amounts of data are lost to us forever because we simply don't have enough "space" to retain it. We have grown dependent on technological crutches (think of the photograph, the calendar, the humble Post-It note) and our internal memory has suffered as a result. The appeal, nay, the possibility of having vast amounts of poetry or prose lurking unbidden in our minds has diminished to the extent that little children are no longer taught mnemonics, middle-schoolers no longer have to swallow facts whole, and high-schoolers are assured that dates of course don't matter unless you're referring to the non-platonic kind--but I don't want it to. In losing our opportunities to remember, and committing everything to the clean and artless format of digital memory, we are losing the quirky little frailties that make us human. And if we lost those frailties then we would be perfect, if we could remember it all, and we would be as good as and no better than the average computer. And where is the romanticism in that?

So I'll let this post stay a mystery, for the same reason that cold cases stick around while neatly solved, one-week affairs don't; we remember the anomalous, and discard the familiar like dying leaves. After all, I am the personification of memory. There is something to be said about the fallible and oh-so-human art of recall.

~Mnemosyne