Anyway, getting back to the blog I was disappointed to discover many of my older posts seem to be degrading gracefully as well. Lost graphics, links to witty YouTube videos broken or turned private, etc. although the words seem to be hanging in there. And the older the posts are, it seems the more likely they are dissembling. Almost like the bits and bytes are just…degrading gracefully. But it is a comfort to know that not everything does.
For example, I still get mail for my Dad. It has chased me through three addresses since he died 13 years ago and he never lived with me. Pleas for donations of some type, usually. I even get emails, and he never owned a computer. Given this, it is surprising that I don’t get calls for his last chance to lock in on that car warranty.
The post below, from 2010 originally, is a product of this discovery. I inadvertently updated it while trying to figure out what happened, and it brought it to the top of the pile. Can’t undo that. And no point in providing snappy graphics I guess, or trying to fix the old posts, because their temporal context will be lost. Oddly enough, this relates to the 2010 post below:
Today I needed to get outside of my head, so I set out for a bit of a longer ride. The destination: the western end of the W&OD trail in Purcellville, about 21 miles one way. The weather complied, and I set off into the climbing hills. Somewhere around Leesburg, there is a decaying barn just off the trail. I recalled this quote (but not the source unfortunately): “You spend all this time building your barn. Then you burn it down. Sometimes the gods burn it down for you. You rebuild it. That's what we do - it restores our sanity.” As Jimi Hendrix also once said, "And so castles made of sand, melt into the sea...eventually." I found myself presented with a choice of burning down the life I built or waiting for the gods to do it for me. I chose to continue building.
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