I have been deleting people from my Outlook. I'm down to about 8700. Most of them were duplicates, but some of them were people I don't really remember, nor did I have a good reason to want to try and remember. I've been thinking about an ROI on positive karma, and part of me doesn't give a rat's.
Like many sorta smart people, I am blessed and cursed with an unusually dense memory. I remember people I have no business remembering - people who probably don't remember me and probably have nothing to say about me if they do. Why am I such a nice guy?
I'm thinking about this in regards to the odd thing about modern society - how it puts you in contact with so many hundreds of people - enough that you get their name and phone number or email addresss, but little else. I could do this a thousand times.
Georgina Kelly. Oh she's the rep I spoke to who sold me the Mortice Kern Toolkit way back in 96 or 97. I was going to get MKS into my company so that we could do better scripting. It never happened.
Charles Lane. Oh he's the guy who knows everything about construction. He was going to hook me up with the County of LA. it never happened.
Marilyn Parker. Oh she's the guidance counselor that got me into Claremont, and later worked for Drake Beame. Nothing much came of that relationship either. And I had a crush on her.
Hestia Sander. Oh she's the babe who had a brand new Toyota Celica and a friend who lived in Malibu. She was going to get us invited to Hollywood Parties. Never happened.
Dunbar's Number is about 150. That is the limit of people with whom anybody can retain good solid human relationships at any one time. I have 8000 others in reserve. For what? I have no idea. I have no idea.
On this tangent, I am thinking about the 'socialist' ethos of Christianity. Christ asks us to love our neighbors as ourselves. And he must truly have understood, being God and all, how this would work in the world of the future before his second coming. It must have meant everything to him to ask this of us as his primary commandment. And yet we know that human beings are so very different that only on the most intimate level does this injunction mean anything at all. We can't love everyone. We can't even keep track of everyone. Where is the power in that? Where is the wisdom in that? it only makes sense if you give into it absolutely, one must be an apologist for Christianity in order for it to be comprehensible.
It leaves us with a series of smudgemarks we make on people, like bumpercars in the eternal human circus. It is an absolute reason to be charitable but to no end other than the belief that you become a better person for doing so. If you tell everyone in life to have a Coke and a smile it's good enough. The net effect is positive. It scales wide, but not deep. None of those thousands will do so much as call you back on the phone. All you merit is a pleasant memory, a few calories worth of effort to put the name with the face and say a sentence or two. This is how we exist in the margins of other people's lives.
I am feeling ill today, and finally it makes me write something I'm actually feeling. I haven't been feeling much for a while.
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