Thoughts Upon Being a Grown Ass Man, Part I

Oh god, I must turn away from the internet at some point.  I'm obsessed with the idea of social networking profiles staying up forever, long after the person has died.  I hate the idea of this.  Digital memorials are chilling, disturbing, weird.  I don't want my last internet-words to remain published forever.  Hanging there like a wraith of yesterday, forever exclaiming about the obnoxiousness about Dr. Phil's twang.  

I like the idea that there is some anonymity in death.  Like it or not, death makes us quite unavailable; unavailable for conversation, and generally unavailable for perusal. 

I have actually considered including in a living will document the passwords to all of my internet personae, so that a trusted person may unplug them all!  Delete, delete, delete.  I will not undulate on the internet for eternity. 

But while we are all still alive, the pages of the past continue to fascinate me.  I have spent many days idly reading back through a friend's Livejournal lately.  It is five years of a girl; it ends in brilliant, masterful, absurdist accounts of a life, and descends back through the years into the everyday rambles of a grown child.  She stopped posting in 2009 or something, although she is around somewhere.  I read this journal and I can't get over how witty, how sharp, how sad, but how continuous it all is. 

Then I look to see what I was doing on some particular day in 2004, 2006, 2008, and am reminded of why this journal may not need to stand sentinel to my former days.  

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little hell flames wrote, 2005-05-11 18:12:00

i've fixed the hole in the crotch of my jeans with safety pins, just for the night.

i'm terrified, but so lazy.

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The reason this came up, aside from the fact that I've been devouring her journal like a weird life manual written by a contemporary Los Angelean Charlotte Bronte, is because I can't remember my old Myspace password.  I haven't logged in in years, and none of my old passwords work.  Do you know what this worst thing ever is?  Having a hilarious password.  You can't tell anyone!  So I tried my old hilarious passwords and my not so hilarious passwords, and I'm locked out.  The email I used is old and defunct, so I can't retrieve it.  And my profile is public.

So there I am forever, for the rest of Myspace, dangling in my early 20s, scowling in bars, epitomizing all that I was then. 

I suppose it'll be all right.  I'm not a revisionist anyway.

gother, Myspacer dayz