A Heavy Layer of Virtual Dust

Last post, October 2006. This blog has lain pretty much undisturbed since then. You could blow the dust off it. Except it would be virtual dust, whatever digital accretion gathers to unaccessed memory. I imagine it as a layer of faded greying electrons, washed up on a disused circuit along with ancient undeleted emails, unopened e-newsletters and drifts of old spam. As the browser disturbs them, like an intruder's breath, they scatter into the air and sparkle briefly like motes of true dust in a sunbeam. All this happens unseen, of course, lost and microscopic in the vast depths of some anonymous server.

The thing exposed, like anything that needs dust blown off it, is an obscure artefact with a faint patina of sentiment and no conceivable purpose. Did I really write a travel blog? Who for? I'm quite sure no one read it. And were my travel adventures really as unadventurous as they appear in retrospect? I suppose they were. My main memories of that trip comprise of wandering wet and heartbroken around Vancouver and my lung nearly exploding as I climbed a mountain. I'm not exactly waiting on someone to offer me a movie deal for my story.

I have a theory about blogs, and diaries and all kinds of personal record that you only keep them when you're not really doing anything. I mean if you were actually doing stuff you wouldn't have time to sit down and tell yourself about the day you just had, would you? You'd be too busy. So the only things that get recorded are everybody's in-between times, their idle musings, daily nothings and minutely described inactivity. When future generations clear the dust, real and virtual, out of long abandoned servers and painstakingly recreate the data of our time, they will reach the conclusion that we were all a bunch of idle whingers, who never DID anything.

Except maybe review films. Which is what I'm going to dedicate this blog to now. In theory. If you're a member of a future generation and this is the last post, then you'll know I was only making idle promises. Or else that I went and did something amazing and didn't have time to tell myself.