Concrete Pencil: Clearing your head
Dan Bourke can't wipe away that night on the Green Bridge
I've got a new thing on my Mac called Time Machine. It takes me back.
I went to see the Clash in '77, the Stones in '66 and Elvis in '55. I got drunk in Soho with Dylan Thomas and in Bloomsbury with Virginia Woolf. I was there when John Wesley Powell sailed down the Colorado into the Grand Canyon and I drank fine wine as Rome fell.
You wouldn't get that on a PC.
But we've been through that, the whole odious Mac/PC thing (they're both computers). And clearly my little laptop doesn't take me back in time. It is, instead, a hard-drive back-up.
Which is, I admit, not very sexy. Although it is pretty clever which is not quite as an appealing quality as sexy.
Clever in as much as it records your entire computer day by day, keeping a snapshot of how it was yesterday, the day before and back through to when you started.
(After a set time it aggregates them so you get a snapshot of each month. Quick, next paragraph: I'm even boring myself.)
So it's like revisiting the old you - finding out what was consuming your life two months ago.
I got to wondering (because I had work to do), what if you could do that with your head? If you could go back on your head. wiping all the files you've accumulated in the past 10 years, would you do it?
I suppose it depends what kind of decade you've had.
Your memory will be less cluttered, of course. You'll know fewer songs and fewer people in total, probably.
Your network might see more action, though: Did you meet more people more often back then? Was there more interfacing, back then? As in, I'm going to inter all over your face? If you've been in this city of bastards all that time your integrity drive has probably lost a bit of its oomph.
You'll have more inerasable trash, no doubt.
Memories and feelings you want to get rid of but can't. Like what you did on the green bridge after the Christmas party in 2003.
What would be in the most used items, back then? Do you have more fun or less, do you think? Are you more stable these days, are there fewer crashes?
For what it's worth, I'd certainly take the most up-to-date version. I'd swap the full Calendar app and hairline for what I have today. I couldn't really tell you what different about the working of my head today, but I know somehow that it's better than before.
And if you'd asked my hard-drive a decade ago, it wouldn't have asked for more than that.
Leave a comment