Shouting into the void / pondering memory

Yesterday, Tony at Off Hiatus Baseball Cards put up a post talking about the 1954 Topps Scoop set, which I enjoyed as it's my all-time favorite non-sport set.

Yet in the comments, several regular readers/commenters of mine said they had never seen the set before.

Even though I've posted about it multiple times. Here's the tag I have for it, though it does not cover every post as in some cases I've run out of space in the tag section and listed the card subject instead of the set, usually the first thing I bump for lack of space. 1954 Topps Scoop. I've written a couple more that remain in  my queue as well.

This kind of threw me into a bit of a funk, I saw this not long before bed and I stewed on it the rest of the night and this morning. I've not been in a good mood lately anyway and it really makes me wonder why I even post things, sometimes it seems like a fool's errand; to be honest.

I've always said I do it for myself first and foremost but I also want to get knowledge out there, expose people to cards that I enjoy and I think they might enjoy as well.

Maybe the people I thought were regular readers of mine aren't. Maybe the views I'm seeing on my dashboard are simply my refreshing the page hoping to get a comment that will never come. Maybe I'm wasting my time by doing this. I know that in reality I get more comments than most card bloggers...that's just the insecurity in my head I suppose.

I'd like to think that's not the case, and I know that I miss posts from blogs that I am a regular reader of. Maybe it's some cosmic joke that one of my favorite sets to post about happens to be the blog posts that everyone misses. It could happen.

I like to think that by doing this my knowledge will survive beyond me. I have years of random card trivia in my head that while is not necessarily exclusive to me,  my writing of it is. Hopefully by putting it up on Google, owners of Blogger, it will survive for years to come. I can't guarantee that of course...but if I don't get it down on "paper", it wouldn't even have the chance to survive.

I want to make clear, I am not mad at the bloggers who commented on Tony's post. It just made me wonder if I am banging my head on the proverbial wall or if there is actually some benefit to doing this beyond the simple enjoyment of it. I know that the posts I put the most effort into, the ones I am most proud of, tend to be my least popular. Like I said, cosmic joke.

And that brings me to another topic that I've been pondering. It's about memory. Mine is terrible, as I've noted several times. But I have some great memories of the time period 1988-98. Yet while they may be things I think back on and remember fondly, they really don't matter to anyone else, and since I am not really eloquent enough to properly describe them, they reside in my head alone, and have a finite lifespan. As I read through Archaeology magazine (my favorite) I think about the fact that we know nothing about the people who they are digging up. What was their personality like? What memories made them smile? What was their name? What did they enjoy doing? What had they seen in their lives? What did their voice sound like? We usually don't know...and we have know way of knowing, ever. That's depressing, really. We know the important events for more than 5000 years of human history, but we really don't know the people themselves. What we usually CAN figure out is why they died. That's their only historical notation for most people.

My best memories are of going to Lake George, waking up in the morning and looking out at the water while I ate breakfast, seeing it glint off the sun as the waves moved, seeing the array of boats large and small, the seagulls flying, the leaves blowing softly in the breeze, the slow chugging of the Minne-Ha-Ha's paddle wheel propelling her up and down the lake, echoing off the mountains followed by her steam calliope. That's all gone now. There's no way to really capture it on film, although I have hundreds if not thousands of photos and videos trying. We can't go back to the place where the memories were made, after going there every year- usually more than once a year- from 1987-2012. We still talk about a family trip in 1997 that was only 4 days, yet we crammed in as much as we normally did in our week+ stays. That's another fond memory that is shared by only three people...nobody even knows it existed besides us so nobody else could even remember it. And my terrible memory means most of the details are lost to me. I remember that it was a 4 day trip, it was a lot of fun, and that we did a lot of stuff, but the actual "stuff" that we did...that's lost to me. And as time goes on I'm losing more and more and it's very frustrating.

I can look through our family photos, clearly see myself in some place, doing something...and yet have no memory of it, weather it be the 1990s, 2000s or even just last year.

As I've said that's one of the reasons I began this blog. I wanted to get things written before the memory disappeared. It's worked well. For some reason my collections are something I have been able to remember more details on than other things. I don't know why that is; it's just how my mind works, I suppose. But even that is not as good as it once was...and how I think of it being. My 1/64 NASCAR collection used be #1, especially the Racing Champions section. Yet when I finally created a paper listing and integrated them into my collection proper just last month, I made many mistakes because I simply couldn't remember what was what. That bothered me more than I let on at the time, but I chalked it up to the immense amount of pain I was in...but I don't think it was caused by that at all. I think it's just...me.

What I'm getting at in my usual round-about manner is that I hope by writing this blog, and my other rarely updated blogs, is that I hope that I at least leave some small footprint on history.
I am considering starting two new blogs- one for my automotive photography, and one for my nature photography. But I have put it off so far due to the fact that I rarely ever update my other collection blogs that I know it might not even be worth my effort. I currently have all my photography on my website but unlike Blogger, which is free, my website is something I pay for...and when I am no longer able to pay for it, it will be gone forever.

Here's a favorite photo I've taken.

also my desktop wallpaper

Of course, I'm well familiar with computers crashing, corrupting and losing things- I'm on computer #3, I'm in a multi-year project of recreating my collection files due to them being lost in a floppy disk crash, my remote hard drive fried less than a year ago taking months worth of work, etc. So I am well aware that all I am doing could disappear in an instant and I would have no control over it. But I can't just give up and not do it, either.

I'm sorry to have another "existential crisis" post, and another with no actual card scans in it. I will try and get back to normal card posts next time.