Hot Shit 2017

As we rolled into January, I had some gardening to do in my Spotify playlists. Part of that was moving older tracks from my “Hot Shit” playlist into my “Hot Shit 2017” archive. There was a degree of sadness involved in this beyond the implication of being another circuit of the sun closer to death. I was also losing the original “date added” tags for each song.

On the playlist, the date added is 99.9% meaningless metadata, only really useful for things like showing that I liked that Imagine Dragons song ten months before Channel 7 overlayed it on top of Home and Away and Kitchen Drama Rules ads.

I guess I’m a metadata packrat, something I’m working on overcoming. Gone are those added dates in Spotify. And that Outlook mail archive from my past jobs? Odds are much higher that I’ll delete it rather than ever revisit it. Also, I really should chuck away the cassette tapes of things I recorded off the radio when I was thirteen, and which currently sit in my wardrobe. Not because of the RIAA, but because I pretty much remember what’s on them. I recall the general gist of the emails. I know approximately when I first liked a song. That should be enough.

All around my house is evidence of things I’m only holding onto for nostalgic purposes. I did some (late) spring cleaning last week, put everything I was going to get rid of into a corner of my study. It’s still there.
I should take a lesson from nature. My body is constantly replacing dying cells, skin and bone and organs refreshing at various rates. My body is not a packrat. It’s not holding onto useless cells that will never be used again, stacking them in a corner somewhere.

I wonder sometimes about how consciousness really works. Am I an entity, or just a collection of now-cells with access to memories. And by memories, I mean the gist of the way my brain thinks things went down. Do I really need to worry about spiralling closer to death each year when in fact I’m actually dying every minute, every second, every character, two thousand deaths just in the time it took me(s) to write this entry?

Bradism.com is metadata. Right. Non functional, just information about feelings and lessons learnt over the years. Sometimes I read back, nod my head, smile at my old experiences. But they’re not my experiences. They’re from the life of some million-deaths-ago Brad. The only thing he and I have in common is a domain name.
Anyway, that’s the excuse I use when I laugh out loud at my own jokes from 2013.