Lost history
How can we lose things that are important to us?
When I was in high school, for one of the classes, we made a short film based on the Iliad and the Terminator. Not a masterpiece, mind you, but notable as one of the early works in my film career (such as it has been so far). In the stone-age of home video, I had transferred the film to at least three videocassettes. Copies were given to dear friends. And I have no clue where any of those tapes are now.
I cannot understand why. I have a ton of videotapes...a few years back, I watched all of them - I think - and the movie was gone. My brother has boxes and boxes of VHS somewhere...it is possible that the Illiadinator could be sandwiched between two syndicated Simpsons reruns.
(This isn't the first filmographic item to slip through my fingers. I've been in a few shorts and the beginning of one aborted full-length film, but have never seen the end results of any of them, which is a shame. I played Michael Myers in a film, and am really curious to see how it turned out.)
I was also a prolific writer in high school. With a partner, we wrote hundreds of pages of text. Drawings of the characters. And a lot of those are missing too.
I have some versions that somehow escaped the exodus of their brethren, but they are incomplete texts. Echoes of the original ideas.
There are things that I know are gone and I know why they are gone.
I sold my Inhumanoids, mostly because the toys are weak.
My Smurfs Save the Day Atari 2600 game, complete with all parts? Traded for something stupid in the mid '90s.
But the things that disappeared still haunt me from time to time. My 2nd Transformers Soundwave figure. The first ring that my wife gave me. The picture of me, my brother, and cardboard Mike Schmidt.
I suppose there is always time-travel to fix these wrongs. And to superkick my mom before she sold all my original Star Wars figures for a quarter each.
When I was in high school, for one of the classes, we made a short film based on the Iliad and the Terminator. Not a masterpiece, mind you, but notable as one of the early works in my film career (such as it has been so far). In the stone-age of home video, I had transferred the film to at least three videocassettes. Copies were given to dear friends. And I have no clue where any of those tapes are now.
I cannot understand why. I have a ton of videotapes...a few years back, I watched all of them - I think - and the movie was gone. My brother has boxes and boxes of VHS somewhere...it is possible that the Illiadinator could be sandwiched between two syndicated Simpsons reruns.
(This isn't the first filmographic item to slip through my fingers. I've been in a few shorts and the beginning of one aborted full-length film, but have never seen the end results of any of them, which is a shame. I played Michael Myers in a film, and am really curious to see how it turned out.)
I was also a prolific writer in high school. With a partner, we wrote hundreds of pages of text. Drawings of the characters. And a lot of those are missing too.
I have some versions that somehow escaped the exodus of their brethren, but they are incomplete texts. Echoes of the original ideas.
There are things that I know are gone and I know why they are gone.
I sold my Inhumanoids, mostly because the toys are weak.
My Smurfs Save the Day Atari 2600 game, complete with all parts? Traded for something stupid in the mid '90s.
But the things that disappeared still haunt me from time to time. My 2nd Transformers Soundwave figure. The first ring that my wife gave me. The picture of me, my brother, and cardboard Mike Schmidt.
I suppose there is always time-travel to fix these wrongs. And to superkick my mom before she sold all my original Star Wars figures for a quarter each.
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