Contemporaneous to Now.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten to listen. Bookstores stock fiction and nonfiction. Pamphlets are illegal because of market economic theory? No one pays $12.99 for less than 400 pages. Periodicals are spatially precise and temporally never other than contemporaneous to the publication’s period or function. We don’t forget the special issues. Yet, can you get 80 years of time’s year in review? Who can see beyond what is contemporaneous to the now?

I specify as exemplary a correlation of it being also that I can’t watch Kennedy or Reagan at Brandenburg. Cronkite lunar landing coverage footage is not available in any searchable database either public, or for a private fee. I wonder who owns Wikipedia. Wikipedia envelopes me in it’s perimeter limitrophes, I see some void of cyberspace beyond it’s contributors’ voice of fact. I feel encapsulated in a sick Procrustean sense. Someone must be responsible.

By way of example, I remember when all the microfiche file cabinets disappeared at Dubois at UMass and I was told that “someone” had converted it all to digital format. I’d like to meet that librarian; perhaps when all the paper over the lobby is obsolete.

Personally, I, when following orders, once cleaned out a water damaged basement containing the entirety of the veterinary medical virology records of the medical response to the initial eastern seaboard migration of rabies northward into Connecticut. Another time we moved in two giant file cabinets filled with computer printouts of the same files that had been burned to a CD RW. The cabinets were aluminum, tan, in good condition, horizontal, utile. It’s somewhat like H. G. Wells’ “Time Machine” that I once heard that the majority of Disney’s work has been lost because of long term film storage chemical and thermodynamic problems. It was probably raining history at ticker tape parades. So much steel had been gathered in FDR’s scrap drive, then the French must’ve melted it down again into other things. I’m not sure about you, but I’m thinking about pharaonic gold in the woodwork at Versailles. Blame it all on an archetypal persona.

Further, I don’t deny my nation nor the premise of private property. NYSE companies like Ford, Cargill, Citibank, and even Fity need to keep intelligence private. What then is offensive about my chrysalis; where I postulate about unknowns and accept my own ignorance as I scan perhaps my thousandth index. What I mean to say is perhaps summarized by a metaphorical story about papyrus, or maybe clay tablet and stylus. I’ve called the apocrypha an amalgamation of a human record of a migration, places of importance and persons involved. Perhaps old books are relics.

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