Holes in the Head

I realize now that, if by some chance arrangement of circumstances (likely not of my own design), I fulfill my wish to adopt a minimalist lifestyle, I will not ever be truly unencumbered. Oh, I may be relatively free of material albatrosses, but the emotional baggage I carry inside cannot so easily be discarded.

Take quirks, for instance. Even the most otherwise completely rational and visibly sane people have these. For myself, some of my quirks include:

• intense dislike of people sniffing continuously, close to my personal space, rather than blowing their nose
• being irritated by otherwise tech-literate writers who insist on putting an annoyingly redundant hyphen between the 'e' and the 'm' of email (why, William Gibson, why, why, why?!)
• mutter, mutter
  

Labels: personal, quirks

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Now that it has actually happened - overwhelmingly and tragically so - I guess this post is almost sub-trivial. For a number of years now I have had an occasionally reoccurring nightmare where I am standing outside my home (with my family) and watching this massive wall of water rush towards me from the sea. Now we live quite a few kilometers inland, but the sea is still visible from here. One child turns to me and asks if there is anything we can do - and I know there is nothing except to hold tight to each other...

Just the other week my daughter mentioned this same dream to me.

Is this a primal fear we all have and, if so, I can't help but wonder what, in our deeply hidden collective past, engendered it?
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Email is wonderful: I can use it to contact my friends, my co-workers and my boss. I can email whole groups or organisations. I can reach out and ... harass someone. Now that I can blog via email, I can also harass any number of unknown web surfers. Ain't technology amazing!

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In an effort to understand the universe and, most importantly, ourselves, we are accumulating a vast reservoir of knowledge. The containers into which we our this knowledge are often somewhat leaky - especially when its just in our heads! - but, by and large, we seem to have increased our store. But how long will it actually endure... surely nothing short of a global catastrophe will eliminate everything? Yes, I probably have better things to worry about it, but the thought of that sizable asteroid headed our way looms large in my thoughts from time to time.
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Everyone else is doing it in public - exposing parts of their most private selves. No, not their bodies. I am talking about the last inner refuge left to us in these media-driven, globalized times - the inner space in our heads.

Why? By nature we are gregarious - building the biggest hives our technology will allow and living almost on top of each other. For comfort or security or something. And yet, up to now, its still been very hard to guess at the inner thoughts of even our closest visible neighbour. Until blogs. Hundreds of thousands (millions?) of souls online, all pouring out their thoughts and expressing their emotions. Does anyone read them all? Will anyone care about what is written? What about this one... do I care if its read?
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