Roster of The Missing

Just for the record, those lengthy entries I was unable to fully recover are as follow:

As I said in the previous entry, I was pretty upset when I realized these pieces were gone, as several of them represented some of my favorite writing for the year in which they were posted. I could maybe reconstruct a couple of them — The Girl with the Gray Eyes and the Ebert obituary, perhaps, and of course the memes — but they wouldn’t be the same, would they? They wouldn’t use the same language, and likely wouldn’t have the same energy as the originals. And I no longer have any idea what I said about my 43rd birthday, or about the impending demise of 35mm film projection, or about that road rage incident. Losing those posts really bothers me because they were essentially diary entries, capturing what I was feeling about those subjects in real time. And my annual Media Wrap-Up for that year is gone because I didn’t save my paper list (Why should I? I had recorded it here!) I’ve got a record of what movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read stretching back over a decade… except for this one year.

It sounds silly to say this about a few blog entries, but I feel a keen sense of loss and not a little despair over this, even now a couple months after discovering what had happened. I can only imagine what poor Hemingway must’ve felt when Hadley told him the suitcase containing all of his early work had gone missing on a train.

And of course I feel like a colossal jackass for not better protecting my work to start with. If I hadn’t gotten lazy about the backups, I’d still have this stuff.

Run your backups, kids!

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2 comments on “Roster of The Missing

  1. Jaquandor

    The 2012 wrapup is gone? Shit, that’s the one where you namechecked me in the book department. Alas!!!

  2. jason

    Yep, afraid so… that situation really bums me out, I have to say. The long entries were the ones I put the most energy into, obviously, but several of them I thought were just really good… and losing the media wrap-up for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long is a real drag. I’ve been keeping those lists in one form or another since before the blog… 🙁