Bravo! Today I went out and bought an external hard drive enclosure. I had an old 40gb drive I had from like 2000 to 2004 that had just one day died. Of course, I’d never backed it up very seriously, so I lost some unknown number of poems, stories, whatever – those that I hadn’t printed out. I’d done a pretty thorough recovery with the print outs I’d had, but you can never know what else had existed only digitally – except for perhaps one you remembered, but not well enough to re-create… always thinking it would be great if you could just get at that data.
Well, today I did just that. I think I got everything that was of any consequence. I even got pictures I’d given up as lost. Of course, this should happen now, as I go through all the things that I have been able to live without for the last 2 and half years, save for disparate visits. Lots of art I’ve collected or made, gifts from missed friends, memories upon memories. It’s somewhat overwhelming, these emotional spring cleanings always seem to stir up the dust you’d let settle long ago. So, with the old dust kicked up, I can’t help but welcome it back because I was really starting to forget who I was, and it’s hard to remember who you are when you can’t remember who you were.
So now I begin the exercise of deciding what gets out… probably all of it, as a kind of backup, but who knows. As long as the substance exists, we can figure out what gets the lights and what stays as the dust.