Existence

Do you think the internet will last forever?

I mean, relatively speaking. Obviously there will come a point where we all have little chips in our heads that is able to access the nearby McDonald's to place our order and then a robot will come rocketing to our door right as we're internally Googling how to brew our own beer at home. Clearly, I'm aware of where technology is going to take us.

I guess I should back up a little bit. I found myself wondering the other day as I mulled over blog post after blog post...who really cares? I mean, I have my friends. I have my family and they read me, but if I were to up and run away tomorrow to become a member of a bike league in Vienna, would anyone sit at their computer daily at work and say outloud "Something is missing. Something is wrong. Something is incomplete."

This reminds me, somewhat nostalgically and unnecessarily, of the fact that I don't really know my grandparents. I have the occasional story from my own parents and pictures but no real journals. No tapes where they speak into the camera about the day they fell in love or what they think of their tremendous children or what their greatest part of existing had been. I don't have a lock of hair or a book with an inscription.

This is not Debbie Downer intentional. Really, this is just where my head was as I sat down last weekend, ready to ramble about nothing important and realized that, perhaps, I was rambling to no one. That as often as I check to make sure I'm being read, in the grand scheme - it doesn't matter. And if I don't matter...if nothing is missing from the day of my reader without my existence, is it really worth writing?

Which ties back to my internet question. And my grandparent conundrum. The thing is, I plan on being an active member of my family for a long time. Forever, hopefully. I want someone to carry my picture around someday and talk about their crazy grandma who became a hoarder in her late seventies, but only with her book collection and they found her taking her last breath with her nose buried deep in her signed copy of her favorite Judy Blume novel. I want someone to say "my grandma used to paint my toenails...but she was blind, so it was really like feet painting. And then I would have to take it off without telling her. But she usually fell asleep by then, screaming at her cat, so it was cool. She was cool."

I guess really, I need to remind myself that I hope the internet exists forever. Because maybe I'm not writing for you...you, who don't really care if I write daily or weekly or monthly or ever. I'm writing for the next me...for the next kid who can't remember or didn't know their grandparent. Their great-grandparent. Maybe this blog will exist in a place where the greatest collection of archives exist and instead of a crochety old lady at a library, you ask some newager on the planet Venus for their old blogspot editions from 2010 and the guy working there is all "SNORESNORE" but hands them over.

And you discover me. Who I used to be. Where you came from. And that I wrote just for you.