On Safari
Strange sounds, until you hear them again
Set against a rondavel roof, muffled, yet clear.
No barn doors here
Only your wits, and a torch for the scorpions.
Sleep but till dawn, and prepare warmly
For a cold started day making new good-old-days.
Later, reminiscing by firelight, embers flying
Worn out talking, of the real good old days.
When I was a kid, my parents gave me access to what I didn't know were 'contact prints' of old black and whites from their parents (or possibly earlier). The scenes were of hunting parties in the African bush (veld as we knew it). Specifically the results of large antelope such as wildebeest and possibly roan or sable, but also of elephant and big cat hunts.
Sadly, these physical artefacts have long since gone missing. I often think about them four or dare I say fifty years later.
Never mind - I have my own set of "hunting" photos..
These days I maintain a constantly whirring NAS in the ceiling space (with a USB backup and UPS protection) to look after all the photos. music and digital stuff collected over the years.
But do we actually need to keep all the photos!?
Perhaps less is more. But what I would do to have a few of those 3? by 2? inch contact print momentos now.
Discipline is needed to take fewer to start with, cull immediately, then choose a few out of the many.
We all say we'll do it - but never do.
Why would you when for only $1.69 monthly till the end of time the big corporates will gladly keep them all within reach.
So why not just keep it all online - personally, or public? Who do they belong to?
Is it Public Property in the end - terms and conditions be damned? Are we just heating the planet up with our virtual memories? I won't even start on video which is an exponentially bigger problem.
I've seen Gmail accounts abandoned, I've seen them rendered forever inaccessible too - which is probably worse. Sidenote - set up a legacy contact who gets access in the event you stop accessing the account for a set number of months. Make it someone else's problem/treasure trove to troll through.
What about all the wasted effort when apps change or formats change.. perhaps this the natural progression of all things that promised to be forever formats? video tapes -> dat tapes -> CD -> dvd -> -> Blueray -> online -> gone
Do we need at least some physical hand-me-downs (other than photos and now video)?
Look at a bombed city... what is actually important? (Btw Who would have thought we would be seeing such sights again on our lifetime)
The physical items won't last forever though.. even the best quality Kodachrome or Agfa slides (processed in Germany!). But how many of Dad's slide-shows of his "trip to the flowers" can we sit through? This was a popular outing to the Namaqualand daisies that needed to be documented by numerous expansive vistas of varying hues - often with my mother and or the baby blue Toyota Cressida in frame.
But do you think I can find even ONE of these images today?
Maybe what really matters is what we actually give back to the world. And no, I don't mean rolling out the bins every week—or every month, in my case! I'm talking about meaningful services, like teaching and educating others. It also includes the kind of service industry I work in, where my job is keeping computer systems up-to-date and running smoothly. Most of the time, I'm just helping a business stay afloat, but ironically, I'm also protecting people from losing their personal data. That means saving everything from years of work files to massive precious photo collections.
