did some housecleaning on old posts that i was never going to finish

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-<p id="pull-quote">This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano.</p>
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-Jason Kottke posted an excellent collection of [the best things he linked to this year][1] and in it I discovered a New York Magazine article I somehow missed. The article in entitled [*Up With Grups*][2] and is more or less summarized by the quote above.
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-[1]: http://www.kottke.org/07/01/the-best-links-2006 "Jason Kottke's best links of 2006"
[2]: http://nymag.com/news/features/16529/ "New York Magazine: Up With Grups"
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<p id="pull-quote" style="text-align: center">"We'll collect the moments one by one<br />I guess that's how the future's done" <span>&mdash;<cite>Leslie Fiest</cite></p>
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A few days ago a friend of mine on the other side of the contenent rang me up. I tend to go outside when I get a phone call because I like to smoke when I'm on the phone and so as I paced around the driveway I kept thinking I smelled gas, but I couldn't ever figure out where it was coming from.
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-I continued pacing the driveway as we talked, it was too cold to stand still, too cold to do anything but pace really, I always pace, sometimes when I'm thinking, talking on the phone sometimes because it;s cold. The gasoline smell slid to the back of my mind. 
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-My friend and I were catching up a bit since it had been a while since we talked. At some point friend of mine said something I'll probably never forget. We were speaking of age, of trying to adjust to our thirties, of trying to feel at home here, trying to, in some general way, decide if it actually is any different to be in your thirties as opposed to any other age, and then my friend said, "remember me as I was when you met me." 
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-Now the time my friend refers to, when we met, I would have been twenty-six. Personally I would just as soon forget nearly anything and everything I did when I was twenty-six as I'm sure it was largely rediculous and immature. For that matter forget what I did yesterday as I'm fairly certain the same could be said of it as well. 
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-See the thing is when I think about memories I get mainly a collection of mildly amusing, occasionally painful series of embarrassments, misunderstandings and general wrong-place wrong-time sort of moments. Which isn't to imply that my life is a British sitcom, just that I'm not in a hurry to relive any of it. And I think I'm not alone in that. For all the oft-repeated cliches about having it to do over again, I think the truth is very few of would actually take the genie up on that wish.
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-When pushed slightly as to what the heck my friend meant by that state I was only able to a jumbled something about lost innocence and some other such nonsense.
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-Perhaps you can attribute all this to the Proust I've been reading, but since hearing that statement I've been thinking about what it means to remember. In Search of Time Lost -- The final volume is called Finding Time Again. 
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-I've been thinking about how rare it is for people to speak of themselves in the past perfect tense, how seldom our language even allows us to acknowledge our own temporality, but aside from abstractions like that and aside from the somewhat melodramtic nature of my friend's statement, which was not as melodramatic as it comes across here, out of context, 
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-At perhaps the simplest level remembering is reconstructing the past in the present. 
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-There is something terrible about time. Something truly horrifying about time lapse photography, imagine your life displayed in a time lapse film. I'm sure someone over at Flickr is doing it right now. One picture a day every day, same background, same arms length pose, put them together and slap them in a movie and you'd have the first film that might truly qualify as frightening.
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-Our escape from time, the trick we use to ignore its passage on the average day is that it moves just slow enough that we don't notice it except in large chunks. Yesterday is largely indistinguishable from today, last week not that different than this one, months even blur sometimes, it's not until we get to years that we start to think of big changes, real differences, but by then time appears fairly abstract and our memories play it out in still frames. 
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-There is no continuous motion in memory, moments added up minute by minute. 
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-Time is not part of memory, time is the space between memories, it lives in the shadows, runs down between and fills the cracks, 
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At some length my friend and I stopped collecting minutes and said goodbye. I wandered over to my truck and poked my fingers in a puddle to see if it was gasoline. It wasn't which was even more puzzling. Eventually I discovered that there was in fact gas leaking, as it turned out the fuel line had ruptured and the gas was slowly leaking out and running in a thin rivult through the stones and into the grass.
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-After switching to the empty auxillary tank and deciding that that was problem for tomorrow I spent a little longer staring up at the sky in some vain attempt to spot the comet asldkfj, which is passing by at the moment.
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-The akldfj comet was a bit of a surprise, astronomers only learned of it recently, more or less when it came into view (view in this case being view through a telescope). It just showed up there. In many ways that's precisely how aging feels, no one consciously thinks about it. You just show up here. 
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-One of my all time favorite quotes is from Peter Buck of R.E.M., when asked what the secret to REM's success was, he replied, "we showed up on time."