It's all there. Everything. All the time.

I have a lot of thoughts. Ideas. All of us do. Not all or even most of them any good or interesting. But some. Some are very good. And as we become a more information-based society, the number of thoughts and ideas multiply. As we are faced each day by an ever-increasing number of pieces of data, we think more thoughts in response to them. Number gets higher and higher.

Sometimes when I think a thought, shortly after, I think, huh, when was the last time I thought that? Let me give you a fer instance. Someone within earshot mentions The South, and another person responds to that by mentioning Lynyrd Skynyrd, and then I think - to myself - "well won't you gimme three steps, gimme three steps mister, gimme three steps toward the door..." And THEN I think this: "I've known those lyrics for a long time." And then I think: "when was the last time I thought of those lyrics?" And then I think "it's weird that those lyrics don't cross my mind every day." And then, finally "I wonder how long it will be before the fact that I thought of those lyrics fades from my current thought pattern...and when will I next think of those lyrics?"

So imagine that, but with a person you knew. How is it possible that someone you knew - were close to, even - in high school, say, or in college - how can it be that you go a day without thinking of that person?

I think something like Facebook is our attempt to create a simulacrum of our brain that presents every memory and every piece of information simultaneously, contains all our knowledge, thinks constantly of every single person we ever knew, and every event we ever experienced, every song we ever liked.

Facebook is turning us all into the conspiracy theorist, serial killer, or obsessed cop who has a secret room with every wall covered with articles, photos, maps, discarded kleenex, schedules, notes, and bizarre unintelligible scribbles - all in one spot that has become a dense, dark, twisted and deeply disturbing vision of the most important object in that person's life. And when that hidden room is discovered, Julia Roberts loses faith in Mel; the cop's partner's world crumbles; and the serial killer's pursuing detective simply pukes.

in the case of Facebook, Myspace - the Internet, for god's sake - the object of our obsession is our own lives. But who is chasing us to the ends of the earth? Who, faced with this hideous vision of our own personal self-obsession, will lose faith in us? Who is our Julia Roberts?

Thinking of you,
Peter