collation - callback
There I sat, the glowing application presented silently to my querulous eyes. At the outset, sun still shone in through my window. I still had half the day to my own. I wasn't yet deliquent in eating dinner. I wasn't yet on the verge of being late to the world outside, which should more strongly have owned me.
It began with Wikipedia. I'd noticed that a page I'd navigated to from the Google search results was showing itself below a URL ending with an anchor mark - a hash, some colons, a tilde. This, mildly, irritated me. It was the same as with YouTube videos that opened to a timestamp when clicked from recommendations, as if I would ever remember what was said prior to that portion of that essay, or what the preceding section of the symphony had to reveal.
Of course, I would remember. And that is where the trouble lies.
I have been, for some years but particularly the past one-point-five, overly, detrimentally precious about the stewardship of my browser history. It was my usual signature: all or none. It couldn't be malformed. It wouldn't stand to be mistreated.
So I edited it with excessive care. For those truncated videos, I knew that I had either, at one time or another, accessed the base video, or had stubbornly reloaded the page with a clean slate in mind. Thus, the query strings could go. For Wikipedia, I also could dispense with the decorated URLs. Easily. Right?
But it wasn't only Wikipedia. It was also, particularly, medical and scientific journals that used this similar scheme of anchoring. I hemmed and hawed, wondering when it was that I had had the yen to search up Oppositional Defiant Disorder on a non-wiki website when out of school and not dealing with the children that exhibited its characteristic traits.
And then I deleted the entries. I reasoned to myself that the curiosity would come again, if it so chose. As if I would ever remember, and thus perceive the lack.
I turned back to YouTube with a yawning inquisition magnetic at the tips of my fingers. All of the corporate-styled videos - all the videos with a pipe in their title - could go. The stand-up comedy I used to watch (SNL had long been banished, though I found the full-spelled channel yet lingering), the...
Whatever it was. I already can't remember, in any sort of specific. I'm writing this at a pause in my wholescale cleansing of the entire archive, with the individual Google searches already gone. It was during that point in the purge that I recalled with a gasp the readings delivered at one of my holiday concerts. I stopped saving concert programs at the beginning of the pandemic, and so my only hope at recovering the titles (without simply emailing someone up in the leadership to ask) was a piece of paper my grandfather had used to take his notes on what he was and wasn't playing, what parts were and weren't in order.
OG had the paper stuffed in his case, still, sure, and I took it home (actually, first to work, to discuss with my colleague) to diligently make storage of the crucial contents not in a picture, not in a file within my folder of materials for that concert, but in my browser history. Once I'd found the links (the same links as I'd found at work, to varying degrees of amusement), I tore up the paper, or crumpled it, and tossed it out.
Because, I correctly assumed about myself, I would keep it there in perpetuity. I knew the significance of this tool, to me.
But it wasn't truly that reliable. It wasn't backed up on my SD card. It could be tampered with at any time. Not to mention, Firefox's half-hearted segmentations by visit date are not all that intuitive.
So I saved the links. They're here, below, footnotes to nothing. And then I went back to my scourge.
Login pages for every billing and banking service, gone. Fandom wiki pages, just like Wikipedia, scattered. The individual works, in whatever stage of CRUD, within my hidden Ao3 collection, useless. Search results, obviously repeatable and redundant. History from the Internet Archive itself. Eventually I got bold, and began scrubbing out pages I'd visited that pertained to people I didn't actually like all that much. Browsing that had brought me no joy, and little education. Things I shouldn't have done.
Then there were people I did know, but didn't talk to anymore. There was the portfolio, frozen in time, of someone we'd all known, who'd passed away. Of course, also the obituaries and profiles of people from my real, physical life. Was it a betrayal, to remove them from my computer's patient, subordinate memory?
I just turned on the lamp. Very soon, I will be very brave (for me, this is bravery) and just clear the entire cache. Cache of history, that is - a subtle irony, that I'll hang on to the current round of websites into which I've already signed, for some genuine convenience and utility.
I need to let go of it all. I knew this was coming, some days ago when I realized that Tumblr, Twitter and BlueSky weren't actually painting that indelible layer beneath my feet for my mind's security to stand on. It became a powerful opportunity, at that.
I don't know if I remember less, nowadays, or if my life is more. The opposite also feels true, at times. I remember more of the endless nothing that constitutes my days.
I could have made a beautiful poetry of those search engine items. Those desperate questions, and those calculated queries. But not everything has to be poetry. Not everything has to be a monument. This monument, this irrational time capsule of a year and a half, doesn't need to be at all.
Many of the results were so easily discarded at a scan, because I knew that I had already made use of the knowledge and could find them without error again. I always find what I need. I always make use of it. Whether I store it in Firefox, Discord, or Neocities, my determination to unearth what I'd once buried for myself is the strongest and most unifying force of all.
This isn't really a solution, I know. I'm just swinging from one extreme to another. I've been keeping my console history clean for maybe a month, now. I'm not sure. I've been deleting my downloads, zips and alerts both, for much longer than that. I've already been afraid of any paper trail but my own. So the pendulum completes its swing across the line.
If I don't remember it, I don't need it, right? If I didn't write it down, it can't possibly have been that important.
(I did it. It's gone.)
The central tenet lies here. But the links:
Actually, this one was hanging out by itself, too. Also, these two.