I think of it as a kind of a pseudo random number generator for my memory, or maybe a probabilistic PhotoJojo Time Capsule powered by a certain inscrutable logic, but lately the odd blog spam comment that slips through Askimet’s filters and triggers a WordPress “Please moderate” comment email on some long forgotten blog post is more blessing then curse, a chance to remember, sort of.

Roughly 31 minutes ago some botnet left a gibberish comment on a blog post from July 2003, “That certain kind of tired”.

Oddly enough I remember very little about what was going on in my life at that point. I say odd, because here I am reading a diary entry where I’m situated in time, and space (Providence, July 2003), and I’ve posted a hyper specific list of recent movements (“38 hours of bus travel, 19 hours of car travel, 12 hours of air travel, 7 hours of train/subway travel”), yet nothing about that travel comes back to me. An odd unforeseen (by me at least) consequence of diarying in public is I’ve left out the context in preference of the shape of things. I wonder what I’ll make of my Twitter stream 6+ years on (assuming any of it survives and is accessible).

In contrast, my grandmother recently found a box of my great grandmother’s diaries (her mother-in-law) with nearly daily entries for a 20 year span, sometimes obscurely personal in nature, but never the intentionally obfuscating dance of public performance that my old post is.

And there is another kind of unanticipated (again probably only by me) forgetting in that post. A mere 6 years into the life span of that post, of the 5 links in that post, only one of them still works. (and all of these links to the sites of web dorks)

The title of the post is a phrase I borrowed from Jessamyn. Her server seems to be down. Hopefully it will come back up. I can remember thinking as I quoted it that I was pretty sure I’d met her, but I wasn’t sure when, but given our overlaps (mutual friends, mutual alma mater, similar geographic patterns) we’d meet again some day. I still think we will, but it hasn’t happened yet.

And I remember vividly, even though its only alluded to briefly in that original post in an attempt at wit and snark, that just prior to writing that post was the first time I met my good friend Aaron in person. We sat outside on the porch at The Otherside Cafe on Newbury St., in Boston, and talked about many many things including my first, but hardly my last, attempt to make him explain RDF to me.