Well, not exactly dead and not exactly letters. My friend Zaida at Manhattan's Peak has a great post up about importing some old posts from a previous incarnation of her blog and it got me thinking about a similar thing that's been happening in my life for the last couple of weeks. I've been getting old e-mails.
See, I got a new computer a couple of weeks back, a brand new, sleek and shiny laptop. My old laptop had soldiered on bravely, but was slouching towards obsolescence. The battery had failed a while ago, the CD burner came and went and I'd packed it to the gills with plays, short stories, pictures and what-have-you. It wouldn't be long for this world, so it was time for an upgrade.
I figured, since I was upgrading, I'd go all the way. As anyone who's talked to me for more than a minute knows, I'm a resolute and passionate PC guy. Screw Apple and their slick, easy-to-use computers. I like mine tetchy, surly, somewhat unresponsive and difficult. Like my women. Which explains many other things. But moving on.
Since I was getting a new computer, I figured I'd step up to all the new bells and whistles. Yes, that means the dreaded Vista. This would eventually try my patience. Be careful what you wish for and all.
For the better part of a decade now (and, Jesus God, it's weird to write that sentence), I've been using Outlook Express as my e-mail program. I've moved my accounts from computer to computer, set it up on various work computers. It's simple and I like it and, most importantly, I know it really well. So, of course, Microsoft has discontinued it for Vista. *Sigh* Okay, fine, I thought, out with the old, in with the new. I moved over to Microsoft Mail, their new e-mail program, and went about getting my old messages.
Anyone who's talked to me long enough to discover the depths of my disdain for Mac products has also talked to me long enough to realize that I spend a lot of time online and do a lot of e-mailing. In many ways, it's my preferred method of contact. Maybe it's because I'm a writer, or surprisingly shy and reserved, or maybe all of the TV I watched as a child has permanently warped my brain. Take your pick. I use my e-mail a lot, I get a lot of e-mails, sometimes even from actual people and I like to keep archives. For a while, on my computer before my last, I had several years of messages stored in Outlook Express. When, for some reason, I couldn't import them onto my new computer, I hung onto the files, thinking someday I'd either figure it out, or I'd get a new computer and be able to import them. It was honestly one of the things I was most excited about getting a new computer for.
But when I got my new computer, I couldn't find the old files. Which was a major bummer. Still, I soldiered on. I set up Microsoft Mail, hooked it up with my Yahoo account and started downloading the messages. I have about five years' worth. Five years of e-mails is, well, a lot. Something like 60, 000. I'm not kidding. It's a lot. And downloading it takes a lot of time. I set it up and then went and did things like go to work and come home and it would still be downloading.
Which was fine and dandy once. But then, for reasons known only to Bill Gates, every time I opened Microsoft Mail, it would start all over again, downloading the same messages again and again. So I switched to Windows Live Mail. And downloaded 60,000 messages again. But then it wouldn't download any new mail. So I switched to Thunderbird. 60,000 again. Again, no new mail. Apparently, I'm not meant to be downloading messages right now. Or maybe never again.
Watching five years' worth of e-mail scroll by, three or four times over, can be really overwhelming. Names pop up that you haven't seen in years, they suddenly dominate your e-mail, then fade away, replaced by other names. Threads come and go, themes, jobs, you relive old events. Sometimes I would be intrigued by a subject line that I didn't remember, or a sequence of events that I'd forgotten about. Sometimes I would read an e-mail from someone I'd lost. Sometimes I was amazed to find how the same kinds of situations, the same subject lines, the same threads would crop up over and over again. Sometimes I was amazed to find how much I'd changed, how I'd responded to something before. It was like finding a real-time diary.
But maybe the lesson of it all is to let go. Do I really need to carry the last five years with me all the time? Aren't today's message more important than last year's? Live in the present goes the old mantra. Live in the now.
But at the same time, this is my past, my history. My achievements, successes, failures, heartbreaks and fuck-ups are there, in cyberspace. I know that somewhere, somehow, they just might exist forever. And I'm okay with that. How will they ever publish The Letters of J. Holtham without five years of e-mail? Maybe it's a good thing.
But, after a month of seeing my past scroll down my screen over and over again, I'm ready to let it go and start a new archive. So feel free to send me an e-mail. In five years, it might remind me of this moment.
