3 files changed, 1 insertions, 83 deletions
diff --git a/everything all the time.txt b/everything all the time.txt
index 5cc7b42..03b246d 100644
--- a/everything all the time.txt
+++ b/everything all the time.txt
@@ -1,15 +1,3 @@
-<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>
-
-<img src="/media/images/2007/end.jpg" alt="Window" width="173" height="260" class="postpic" /><span id="intro">A while back</span> a friend of mine who I hadn't spoken to in quite a while rang me up. At some point we got to talking of age and memory and time. We were speaking of time passing, of the curious moment we both find ourselves in now -- trying to adjust to what I at least can safely call the middle of my life -- certainly no longer the beginning. And then my friend said, "remember me as I was when you met me." 
-
-I laughed. Now the time my friend refers to, when we met, I would have been twenty-five or twenty-six. Personally I would just as soon forget nearly anything and everything I did when I was twenty-five as I'm sure it was largely ridiculous and immature. For that matter I should probably forget what I did yesterday as I'm fairly certain it wasn't a whole lot better. 
-
-I don't know if I'm just overly paranoid but when I call up memories in the dark hours of the Beaujolais-soaked pre-dawn, I get mainly a collection of mildly amusing, occasionally painful series of embarrassments, misunderstandings and general wrong-place wrong-time sort of moments. 
-
-<img src="/media/images/2007/old.jpg" width="268" height="137"alt="Five and Ten" class="postpicright" />Which isn't to imply that my life is a British sitcom, just that I'm not in a hurry to re-live any of it. And I don't think my friend is either. No my friend was not expressing a desire to rewind as it were, but rather acknowleding that since we rarely see each other these days we must necessarily exist mainly as memories.
-
-There's an inevitable sadness to that realization.
-
 A few days later I was testing a piece of photo software for my day job at Wired and I happened to run across an image from roughly that time of my life. I don't know for sure if it's the oldest picture I have, but I've always thought of it as the first picture I took of my friend.
 
 There was a strange disconnect though, as I stared at my friend's image and my own frozen in pixels. For all we like to think that photograph's record, they don't. Kodak was wrong, photographs don't capture memories they just provide thin little links to them; time passes and memory continues to add impressions and in the end what you have is just one piece of a collage of memories which, taken out of context, as a photograph must be, becomes a distortion, something you no longer recognize as your friend. 
@@ -20,16 +8,8 @@ Slowly, after staring at the picture for a while, my attention drifted away and
 
 At perhaps the simplest level remembering is merely reconstructing the past in the present, but there is no continuous motion of memory through time as there is in the present, we do not recall events in the order they happened, but rather by the things that link them. Memories stack up at crazy angles like a card house that topples before the pinacle is reached, the final card laid, the final card lies forever out of reach, beyond tomorrow. 
 
-<img src="/media/images/2007/shadow-me.jpg" width="240" height="161"alt="Me" class="postpic" />In many ways time has nothing to do with memory, save to act as a marker. Time is the space between memories, it lives in the shadows, runs down between and fills the cracks.
+In many ways time has nothing to do with memory, save to act as a marker. Time is the space between memories, it lives in the shadows, runs down between and fills the cracks.
 
 When we do try to introduce time into our memories we often have to stop and think -- now when did that happen? The memory, the reconstruction of the past in the present happens unaided but it often bounces here and there joining with other memories linked by smell, taste, sound and more, but almost never by time. Placing a memoriy at a specific moment in time rarely comes as easily, we rely on context, the shirt you're wearing, the hat your friend has on or maybe the length of your hair.
 
 Perhaps we let time slip from memory because it isn't necessary, perhaps time only matters in the present. But even then we do our best to ignore it. 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 larger chunks. 
-
-I recently came across someone who subverted that though. Imagine your life displayed in a time lapse film. The very thought of it is intimidating, almost unimaginable. Well have a look at [Noah Kalina's YouTube montage][1] (embedded below). For six years Noah took a picture of himself every day. Personally I find Noah's video collage to be one of the most beautiful and truly frightening things I've ever seen, which probably explains why it's one of the most watched movies on YouTube.
-
-Each photograph on its own is mundane, hardly worth comment, but in rapid succession they stitch together and form a thread of time moving through life, and even though we watch Noah pass through six years in three minutes, as you watch his face becomes after a while only a thin veil between our own reflection in the screen and time screaming past.
-
-
-[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B26asyGKDo&mode=related&search= "Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years"
-
-<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6B26asyGKDo"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6B26asyGKDo" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>
diff --git a/fence.txt b/fence.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 21ae7b6..0000000
--- a/fence.txt
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@@ -1,17 +0,0 @@
-Fence Me In
-
-One of the first things I did after we bought our house was to extend the chain link fence that enclosed the back yard to also enclose the front yard. I've been having second thoughts ever since.
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-I come from a place full of fences. Not little half height chain link fences like we have, but full six foot sealed privacy fences that encircle every property line. I assumed this was Just How It Was for a very long time. One of the big revelations of my life was coming east of the Mississippi River for the first time and realizing that in fact this was not just how it was.
-
-There is plenty of unfenced land out west, where I am from, far more than there is back here, east of the Mississippi where I now live. But that's open land. In the city and towns of the west, particularly southern California, the privacy fence is de riguer.
-
-As a child the privacy fence is a near absolute barrier. Sure, you can scale them, but they you're in someone else's property. I suspect that if you rounded up kids from where I grew up and surveyed them on attitudes toward open space and compared them with kids who grew up in places where the privacy fence was known only as a prop in bad sitcoms, you'd get some startlingly different outlooks on open space and live more generally. Where you can go affects your ability to conceive of where you can go. Which is to say the limits your immediate culture imposes on you run a very high risk of becoming your own -- that's what culture is and what acculturation is for.
-
-One of the things I really liked about Athens when I first came was that there are far fewer fences in general and almost no privacy fences. Or at least there didn't use to be. Now that I've been in this town off and on for nearly a decade and half now I'm starting to notice a change -- there are more fences. More shocking to me, the privacy fence cancer seems to be sweeping east.
-
-SO when I ran that chain link a sixty feet further around on two sides of my house I was worried that I might be contributing to the problem, inhibiting the cowpaths as it were. I have dog, so I've got excuses, but sometimes excuses are just that.
-
-Last week I, along with family and friends who pitched in, completed the fence around the front yard.
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-
diff --git a/you never arrived.txt b/you never arrived.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 51f5429..0000000
--- a/you never arrived.txt
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@@ -1,45 +0,0 @@
-<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>
-
-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.
-
-[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"
-
-
-<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>
-
-
-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.
-
-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. 
-
-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." 
-
-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. 
-
-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.
-
-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.
-
-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. 
-
-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, 
-
-At perhaps the simplest level remembering is reconstructing the past in the present. 
-
-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.
-
-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. 
-
-There is no continuous motion in memory, moments added up minute by minute. 
-
-Time is not part of memory, time is the space between memories, it lives in the shadows, runs down between and fills the cracks, 
-
-
-
-
-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.
-
-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. 
-
-
-
-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."