selfisharchivist

[selfisharchivist]

1 - Personal History: An Impetus for the Archive

Three Short Stories About My Life

1. Pictures and Memories

Late nights and single road highways are the fertile crescent of introspection and honest discourse. Yesterday provided me two hours and excellent company as I drove myself and one of my partners back from the beach to her house.  I shared with her an episode of and NPR show called “This American Life.” The episode was entitled “The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar,” and it detailed journey of one woman as she explored a family legend involving kidnap.  (The show is excellent and I recommend giving it a listen but it is the setting for my story, not the focus).  Listening to this story got me thinking about all of the stories I have heard my extended family tell about the people and places they grew up around.  The older I get the more I realize that those personal histories, those stories, those memories of people all pass as we forget them, giving people a second death - one of memory.  

Last year my grandparents had to be moved into a nursing home as they were no longer able to take care of themselves and my parents weren’t going to be able to give them enough of the attention that they needed.  This resulted in the adult members of my extended family going through boxes and boxes of old things mainly including piles of unsorted photos.  The family went through them and put together coherent albums for posterity but there were so many pictures that putting them all into some kind of archived format was going to be unrealistic and no one particularly wanted to deal with all of that.  At the family reunion we have every summer we all went through the remaining pictures.  I couldn’t help but notice how many unlabeled pictures we went through that no one in my family could recognize.  There were family members photographed that no one knew, people who had been forgotten - who have died that second death. 

 2. My Musical Family

Music has always been a keystone feature in my world and in my development.  My dad’s bachelor’s degree is in music and my brothers and I all took various lesson growing up.  Indeed, my uncles and cousins on my dad’s side of the family have all had some formal training in music and many also have degrees in music.  It will come as no surprise, then, that my bachelor’s is in music education and my day job is teaching music. I credit my grandfather (and I suppose my great grandfather) for my musical heritage.  My grandfather was part of a gospel quartet for a very long time and music was just as big a part of my dad’s childhood as it was mine.  Due to this, its not an uncommon experience for my family to sing in four parts when we get together.  Indeed, at my grandfather’s funeral we all sang a few hymns and the power of that moment for me can not be overstated; several generations of Sivils’s all singing to celebrate the man that started us down our paths. I vowed that if we got together like that again and sang that I would get very good recordings made.

3. 90s Kid

I am a child of the internet - a digital native.  I grew up suffering the droning wails of dial-up and exploring the bold new frontier of the web.  I spent time on messengers and blog sites that I really had no business being on and making friends with strangers across that vast cyberspace.  I also, like many of us, experienced my sexual awakening there by stumbling into porn and going down that rabbit-hole.  My journey through adolescence involved making way too many accounts on websites I don’t even remember and many of which have perished in the constant onslaught of creation that is the internet.  

These days I function successfully as a digital citizen, cultivating blogs for aesthetics, social media for connections and just enjoying the content I care about, but the ghosts of internet past still lurk out in the aether. 

What These Stories Mean

These three things have all collided in me to spark the beginning of a journey.  That late night car ride, and the relevant discussion with a woman I love, has made me want to properly explore and document my personal and family history.  Today, again after an interesting discussion with that same woman I love, I decided to try to find the relics of my internet past with specific focus on one blog I had for a very short period of time.  The website was called melodramatic.com and I got an account on it to facilitate open communication with a partner I had in a clandestine relationship.  At the time, it was our bubble, our destiny island floating adrift in a sea of our own feelings and searchable tags on a website aimed at melodrama. The website is now defunct and getting any useful information off of it has proven challenging so it seems to me that that particular part of my personal history is gone to only my memory - a fallible thing, a thing that will fade. I don’t even remember my username so using various resources like the wayback machine have proved fruitless.  

So, at the promptings of my lovely partner and in the mourning of my internet past I have decided to begin a journey of cataloging, an exploration of records, an archiving of myself and my family.  This endeavor serves no other purpose than to create an archive that will exist.  I have no pragmatic reason for creating it or goal in mind with its completion (if it even can be completed).  This blog, too, is but another extension of this selfish quest.  Today I become the selfish archivist.