Nothing Lasts Forever.

Nothing
Lasts
Forever.

Of course, we hear that the internet lasts forever. It doesn't. I've been blogging and uploading photos for a quarter century now. Most of what I've written and uploaded is gone.  Have you been to Otherrealms.com lately? The domain is up for sale... again.  It used to be my weblog for science fiction and fantasy, hosted on Angelfire. It was actually part of my Masters project. 

My writing on Yahoo!360? gone.  Multiply? gone.  My political blog on Bravenet? gone.  My photos on Yahoo!Photos, Flickr, Photobucket? Gone.  and now, it's happening on Google.  My Google Photos? My blog photos?  Going... going...

So once again I've backed up my blog to Wordpress.  Wordpress has a per blog limit on storage, so as long as I keep the archives separate, they should be OK... for now. But not everything transfers over. Photos with links will end up broken eventually.  Looking through the first 10 years archive nearly brought me to tears.  So many images lost, so many videos gone, so much of my past erased.

If you've read my post Katrina Morning in Antlers you'd have some idea why my photographs matter to me.  The interesting thing about the post is that it was written from memory, because I didn't have my hand written logs on hand when I wrote it.  Later, when I unboxed them, I found that it wasn't in Antlers when we saw the news, but the following day in Tucumcari, NM.  It doesn't change the impact or focus of the story, but it does show that facts become a little skewed without preserving a record at the time.

Since returning to California after Ellen's death, I met a woman I'd fallen out of touch with over the last several months.  She just kinda disappeared offline, and I figured she'd probably just ghosted.  Turns out, she has amnesia, and has lost several months of her life.  She recalled my dog a little, but not me, nor us walking our dogs together. She didn't even recall the park (which she had suggested as a good place to walk the dogs in) or what town the park was in.  Now she's trying to piece her life back together.  

Nothing
Lasts
Forever

Not memories, not lives, not records...

I've been thinking more about my own mortality, my own memories, my own records.  I wonder what I would piece together of my life if I lost all memory... what my records, photos, and videos would say about who I am.  What would I be left to rebuild with?

I've also been thinking about my legacy.  What have I done that will have meaning? will have carried on into the future? Whose life have I touched?  I wonder about the young girl in my freshman English class.  Did she keep reading after she left my classroom? Did she inspire others to read?  Did the young woman with the drug dealing mother with the gold tooth decide to leave the projects and go to college, or did she ultimately decide to walk in her mother's footsteps?  Did that young man who grew up in the ultra-conservative family follow his dream to become a chef?  Did his relationship with the young Black woman in my class last beyond high school?  Have any of the children I've had outreach programs with become zoo keepers, or gotten jobs in conservation?  Have any of my friends taken a chance because they've seen me take a leap of faith time and time again.

Have I given anyone hope, courage, knowledge, confidence... and have they passed that on?

Will my only contribution to the world be the fertilizer my body will eventually become?

And will my words, this blog, echo soundlessly forgotten in some corner of the web until they, too, are erased?