I finished a novel today. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I did so on my phone having a license for it for a limited time.
I had checked it out before the same way. In fact, I even downloaded the app from the local library so I could read it. I had seen the book with a friend on one of the best days of my life.
Do you number your best days? The ones in which everything seems where it is supposed to be?
The point of the novel is for the author to get the reader through a set of experiences in order to convey complexities. I barely read anymore but today I took the afternoon off to make sure I could complete it this time. There's a movie version I never want to see but there was still a chance somehow I'd be spoiled.
When I got the license the second time, I realized I had to go back to the beginning. I'd made it surprisingly far last time but I didn't retain much of it. Or at least, I had not been through those experiences recently and I needed to refresh. Van Pelt's writing is tight and I was pulled right in this second time, probably more than the first.
So much of my life feels fictional now. Or at least, I have so many documents that I have written. I work every day to get information out to a paying audience, an audience that I want to grow because I want people to have some sense of how decisions are made in the community. For the past six years, this has taken over my life and the trajectory seems to be that my life will continue to be consumed with what I view as a public service.
But what about the other documents? I have boxes and boxes of journals that capture who I was on all of these different days, handwritten scrawls I cannot decipher anymore. My earliest digital documents are gone due to the retreat of older generation computers into obsolescence. Oh how I would love to play the text adventure game I tried to write when I was in high school!
But I'd love to have what I wrote on the Amiga 3000, a computer my parents and I were forced to buy for entry into Virginia Tech's computer science program. I had no idea yet I wanted to just be a person who writes about a community.
That computer was loaned to a friend with the express instructions I get it back at some point. I wanted whatever I was writing back then from 1991 to 1993 or so. Sometime in late 1994 I began writing on a Mac I inherited from a failed student newspaper at Virginia Tech. I still have many of those documents as I learned in subsequent years that I should try to keep things.
But I have so little from those early years. The first newspaper was one I did at my high school on the PC XT that replaced the Atari 800. There was software that could put together a cute front page and I used it to create something I passed out in class. I maybe have one print copy of the Daily Bean.
Our family had tried to get the Atari 800 connected to what passed for the internet then. Compuserve and others. Was America Online around yet, or was that later? But we could not figure out how to connect through the modem we had bought.
The new PC could do that, though, and I spent high school nights learning about Bulletin Board Systems and would later get permission to set my own up. My first publication was a Fidonet-connected dial-up called Dead Letter Office after my favorite R.E.M. album.
I got really used to being able to make my own jokes, and figured this was enough to make me want to do computer science. If I had actually talked to a counselor, I might have avoided the $3,500 Amiga 3000 purchase.
But it was up to me to figure out my pathway into journalism. I had to fail miserably to realize what I was up against. I did not have any of the skills and I had no idea that Virginia Tech was a place that was perfectly fine with accepting unqualified candidates. Just as long as they bought the computer.
Flash forward to now where I am thinking I may take tomorrow off from publication. I have the continuity for the next newsletter ready to go, which means if anything happens overnight I'm ready to publish.
After typing this, a source got back to me and so I do have at least 600 words to inform a meeting that's happening. I have a backlog of bigger stories to write. And then I realize I missed a meeting this week. I've not taken a break for a long time.
But I do take breaks. Every single day is a gift as I spend my day searching for new music, trying to keep my house clean, attending to my two cats while continuing to mourn the recent loss of a third.
I write this during a World Cup and Panama playing Croatia and I think back to the likelihood there are other entries in this journal about the World Cup in the past. This tournament creates a set of experiences that can be indexed by year. Many of the written journals have references too, I suspect. Much of what I have written exists somewhere.
I am a human being as fully realized as the characters that Shelby Van Pelt brought to life in Remarkably Bright Creatures. I think about how all of us are alive and yet so many are not encouraged to document their lives. No one told me to do that, but I felt I needed to do so in order to be relevant.
I've spent most of my life alone and so I've tried to keep myself company. The older me really wants to know what younger me was thinking, and I have so many examples of younger me explaining what I wanted my life to be.
What do you want your life to be? What has it been? Do you know yourself? Are you at peace?
What does it mean to be at peace? Is that a state that can be attained despite the general turbulence of the political now?
I have an understanding of my life and how I have accomplished what I wanted to do. I do not say that to brag or to make myself superior to anyone. I wanted to leave a set of breadcrumbs throughout my life to connect me to me. Through that I am at a peace I cannot explain.
A peace that allows me to feel more confidence as I come ever-closer to my end and the time when my consciousness cannot be documented.
But I am hopeful that what I have written throughout my life might be of use to the future. I didn't die young and I lived and a reason I cried at the end of the book is because I know many individuals who didn't get to live very long.
I live on wishing they were still here, but acknowledging life is fleeting. Sail your ships accordingly.
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