Robert Manners

Oh Dear, Oh Dear!

I feel like a mother whose child has been kidnapped. All that text, gone! And I don't know for sure that it's really gone, though I suspect it is... but I can't process and grieve until I know for sure. I need the police coroner to show me the body... I need a Pyra Labs employee to email me with condolences (at which point I will demand they warn people to back up their content before transferring things from one account to another).



I think what I'm going to do if it turns out to be true, that two thirds of my content has disappeared into the ethers, then I think I am going to create a new site and take down this whole thing. I've often considered a site redesign, but I do like my colors and graphics the way they are. Perhaps this (possible) tragic loss is the Universe telling me to let go of what I have in order to reach for something new and better.



I don't deal well with loss, though... especially loss of property. I lost so many things in my childhood, during our many moves and "moonlight flits" (my mother had issues with paying rent, she always believed that the first and last month's rent were quite sufficient for one's entire tenancy), that I've been traumatized into psychopathic pack-ratting. I can usually throw something away if it's smelly or messed up in some way (which my poor sister still can't do), I have become somewhat adept at giving away clothes that I don't wear anymore because they don't fit (that's a different trauma) or are kind of tacky, and I often lose things without ever realizing it (I mean, with so many things in my life, quite a few could go missing without my ever remembering they existed), but when I lose something that means something to me or which I still want, it freaks me out.



I once threw away all of my old magazines when I moved from a housemate living situation where I had my own room and plenty of space to a studio-mate situation where I shared a room and had no closets to speak of. Five years' worth of Town & Country, GQ, and House & Garden subscriptions, along with random issues of Vogue and Advocate and whatever, were put in paper bags and dropped off at a recycling center. That was, like, twelve or thirteen years ago... yet I have been palpably missing those magazines ever since. And I have kept every magazine I got ever since then, stacked and indexed and stored away for some day when I want to remember who was on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1997 or I need to know what was Vogue's must-have skirt for Spring 2001.



Another time I sold most of my books in order to raise money while I was unemployed; in the years since then, I have replaced almost all of them... with the exception of those that are long out-of-print and I may never find them again. My book of Robert Adam designs for Georgian Neogothic castles, my hardback Augustin Gomez-Arcos The Carnivorous Lamb, my book of Mel Odom prints, my library edition of Mary Renault's The Charioteer, so many treasures lost in the desperation of poverty. And what kills me most is that I only got $40 for my bags of life-blood, which kept me in wine and cigarettes for about two weeks. I just recenlty re-found the paperback Desert Fabuloso by Lisa Lovenheim and Andrew Holleran's Nights in Aruba (oddly enough at the same store where I sold my library in the first place, Walden's Pond Books on Grand), and though I haven't re-read them yet, or even particularly want to reread them, you just can't imagine the satisfaction of returning these two lost sheep to the fold.



Well, anyway, I'd like to continue rambling on in this manner, but I have to go to the dentist. He never keeps me for more than an hour at a time, so I keep having one appointment and then another appointment, a week or two apart. And I have learned to not go back to the office after an appointment, it's just miserable sitting here with the phones ringing while parts of my face are numb and I'm coming down off the nitrous. Fortunately I have about a month of sick-leave accrued, so I don't have to worry too much about missing all this work.



I'll keep you updated on what's happening. And if I do decide on a redesign and/or relaunch, I will be picking your brains for new titles, colors, layouts, taglines, etc. Actually, any ideas you have are welcome all the time. I love ideas.



And now to return to the sinister ducks (might as well use the links, since they do work now). Wish me luck.