Jan. 01, 2003 - 15:22 PST

THE WONDERING JEW

Re-cycle Cycle

Great fun, going through one's diary. At least it is fun for me. I read an entry and it seems like it was yesterday, but usually it is not. Something I posted in my first year of diarying. Yet is fresh in my memory as if I posted it last night.

I am still trying to put together a small chapbook of my early years while growing up in the Depression. Side trips to Google being made occasionally.

It seems impossible to have remembered as much as I do. Ask me what I had for lunch yesterday, or even what time I got up today -- blank ! I am not sure that it is Alzheimer's, just that a lot of things are so routine that they file into #13 the inconsequential things. So I ate lunch, probably supper too, and breakfast this morning. The only two times that things like that stay for just a little while in my memory is if they were very good, or very bad.

In the course of a few days I have almost brought those days back to life in my mind once again, with the same pleasure I had when posting the entries.

The bad things I might have mentioned in passing, but didn't dwell on them. Just blazing the trail more or less to remind myself that there were pitfalls and the Depression to go through.

Sitting here at the keyboard tonight memories of my first days on the net in 1999, learning how to surf, finding Google and Dogpile and other search engines. Find the different art galleries on the web, the works of some authors and poets available. Then, somehow I fell into reading journals and message boards. I really don't remember how that happened, but I ate that stuff up. Here were people talking to me -- as well as others, saying things I liked to hear or things that made me think. Then e-mailing people who had journals and message boards and getting answers back. What a treasure for a man almost totally deaf. I could hear them by sight, read what they said, all without interruption from third parties. What a blessing. I think the are some of the people I communicate with know the real me better than many of those who are physically around me. I prize most highly the fact that most of those I run into are of the same mind as I, we occasionally agree to disagree and carry on from there. In the course of time I have become a cyber brother to some, a cyber nephew to another and to a pair, have become a cyber father and gained a cyber daughter in law.

It is a big world truly, one which I can now travel by cyber-line to the opposite ends of the earth, and I do so, happily.

I guess we all have our quirks and foibles, but one thing I have noted on the web is that everyone there likes to communicate back and forth. Freedom of speech, even cyberwise is one big treasure.

Many of the folks I read and communicate with have helped me sort myself in many ways.

So I hobble along with a cane, trailing an oxygen bottle on a cart behlind me and cyber-soar the whole wide world. Pretty good for an old fart. At least I think so.

A good thing for me is that I can also travel back in my archives reliving as it were pleasant things in my past. Even relive some of my trying times I wrote about while trying to figure myself out.

There are advantages for me in being able to go through the Re-cycle Cycle . . . . . . . . . . .

Blog