Intimations of Immortality.

               I used to know how to set the points and plugs on an internal combustion engine.  I worked on main frame computers from a dumb terminal.  I used an operator to place a long-distance call.  Every few months I had to chisel the ice out of a refrigerator freezer.  Changed the ribbon on the typewriter, threaded film onto little sprockets, found my way around the country by asking directions at the gas station.

All these life skills are now totally obsolete, along with hundreds of others, as a result of advancing technology.  About which I am not the least bit mournful.  I partly wish I could clear some of that antediluvian junk out of my memory so I can fit in more durable information, though I’m glad I got to do all those things, since they represent interesting threads of experience that help stitch the whole thing together. 

This bolsters my belief that there is no such thing as useless information.  I once edited mind-numbingly dense technical papers for a big hydrocarbon processing company.  I don’t remember a single thing I read, corrected for clarity or reassembled to provide a more convincing argument, but I remember how I felt performing the task.  Tired and drained, but also satisfied with myself for having accomplished something about which I was startlingly unqualified.

There’s a silver lining in having worked through the various phases of technological development.  These tasks leave behind tools and skills that can be repurposed for emerging challenges.  Every time I repair something around the house, I use hacks and work arounds only learnable tearing apart car engines and old radios.  The most satisfying is when I can fix something designed to simply toss out and replace.  I feel like I’m sticking it to the obsolescence man. 

            I have difficulty with the word nostalgia.  I think it’s because of the sentimentality and fruitless yearning nestled in the definition.  While I feel enriched by memories of past experience, I have no desire to return to those moments.  The fact is, you can’t go back again, and I don’t want to.  I just don’t want to forget, distort into oblivion, or disrespect, the memories. 

Aside from the people you love, the experiences you have are the only truly meaningful value in having lived.   If you’re a writer, it’s your toolbox, your chef’s knives, color palette, chromatic scale, source code and cheat sheet.    

            Luckily, most acquired knowledge isn’t as perishable as the technological.  The trouble here is accessing it, especially when the content piles up and gears in the retrieval mechanism wear down.  I use this as an excuse for holding on to mountains of books, a trillion nuts/bolts/screws/thingmajigs/tools/spares (ad finitum), bins of curling photographs and old friends.  Also, I may have the short-term memory of a drunken gnat, but I’m great at dredging up the particulars of a high school keg party or a day wandering around Fiesole looking down on the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore di Firenze rising up out of the fog.  The sight of Jimi Hendrix lighting his Stratocaster on fire under the blue lights and strobes at the Electric Factory.  Looking behind me and seeing the dinghy we were towing behind a sailboat rise up ten feet above my head.

Since the brain isn't a digital recorder, I’ve come to learn that many of these remembrances are approximate representations of what actually transpired.  They’re more like 8mm movies with the disclaimer, "Based on the experiences of Chris Knopf, as told to whoever was still around to listen.”

But so what.  Once they’ve been fed into the fiction-writing machine, the provenance is of little importance.