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01/11/2004: "Foreign Country"

Maybe it is technology which has made us such a peculiarly nostalgic people. Even the parts of the past which we despise obsess us. But there is an unacknowledged dissonance between the past we remember and the past we see, in the endless artifacts of photographs, movies, television, video. It is the same past, but the details are blurred, then lost, in memory; but the artifact keeps them all. What are we to believe, the memory or the picture? The youths in my high school yearbook look as alien as Zulus to me, how is it we didn't think we looked strange at the time? If I imagine the past was a simpler, happier time, I have forgotten the horrific details; if I imagine that it was a depressing, repressive era, I have forgotten the reassuring repetitions which are daily life. I have had twenty thousand cups of coffee in my life and not a single one of them was memorable. But the time I spent drinking the first ones, more than twenty years ago, was just as full and real as the time I spend drinking them today. These journal pages are just more life turning into artifacts, in a sea full of them.