Dunno why...

Memory is a funny thing. Things will pop up out of nowhere giving no clue as to why they've floated into sight rather than staying beneath the limen with the rest of memory's jetsom. The past four or five days I've had a shadowy memory float nearly into view, but I hadn't looked at it until just now. That happens now and then, of course; I reckon it's the same for everyone, and that perhaps a word spoken, a scent, a misheard song (or the taste of a madelaine) is the trigger for not just deep memories of childhood or other meaningful things, but more often snippets of information about events we never were part of to begin with. This time began with a vague thought: the punk rocker girl raped and murdered in Seattle... I was lying on my bed just now and wondered what her name was.... had a rare letter in it, Z perhaps... Names burst up with accompanying feelings of "close," "similar." After a couple of minutes it appeared in my mind: Mia Zapata.

Memory is a funny thing. The progression of time is another odd one. I looked up Mia - she died in 1993. Not terribly long ago, but there's a gulf between her world and the one now that seems wide but is less qualitative than about the current highly gadgeted accessorisation. We lean on our gadgets so heavily that were the power grid to go out millions would barely function - I think, anyway. I wonder if any modern eighteen year period would NOT have developments making its end look completely different from its start. Be that as it may it's as though Mia, a young woman whose future was taken from her, lost years that seem to've held the twisting of time from a contiguous grouping of years (libraries, isolation, first-hand experiences) to a new and unrelated group of years (constant contact, second-hand experiences, digital media): a break with the past, a new paradigm, obsolescence of prior beliefs and technology. Surely *that* doesn't happen every eighteen years.

Just now another woman's name popped up: Kitty Genovese.

Labels: About time, Cogitation, Introduction to Time Travel