itsphoebemarie

Not only did I follow my friend Nix HERE, but also took the suggestion to re-activate my dusty old Flickr account as well. I paid for 2 years of pro, which gave me access to thousands of old photos I haven't seen in years, as well as a nearly complete archive of my older art (most of which I thought I had lost in a hard drive failure several years ago).
I've spent some time this morning going through the chaos over there and downloading/deleting from Flickr oodles of ridiculousness... from party and travel pics documenting the days before my social anxiety got to where it is now, to tour photos from when the old man was "on the road", to art shows/Etsy ventures/graphics from my old indie bookstore job, and my brief foray into the world of vinyl toys.
I haven't really even THOROUGHLY looked through all of these images yet, but what I saw was a whole lot of a person I barely remember being...
And not just because I've changes so much, but also because my literal memory is not what it used to be. Between the realness of "chemobrain" and the addition of treatment induced early menopause/10+ years of fighting to get my hormone replacement to where it should have been to start with, my memories of so many things are either gone entirely, or hazy at best.
I go through phases of dwelling on this fact, but it's very much been on my mind recently, as one of my dearest friends is suffering from the terrifying after-effects of encephalitis and has lost most of her memories from the last 5-10 years or more. I love this person so much, and it's truly devastating to chat with her and realize how much this took away. I long to help, to share our memories together to try to encourage those parts of her brain to recall even tiny corners of those lost chunks. She's still my amazing friend, but a lot of our history together is just fog.
Anyhow. Point here was more about the strangeness of looking through photos of years ago and realizing I have no idea who a large number of the people I GUESS used to be my friends even are... but I've downloaded anything that isn't just my artwork from that platform now and hope to clean up and organize what's left, and then start adding newer artworks, and then will privately browse through strange old memories of my former life as the Queen of Cleveland, Red Headed Party Girl Extraordinaire.
Meanwhile, I REALLY AM surprisingly excited and inspired about creating again. About making art and sharing art and just being the person I am NOW.

I am strangely grateful right now for having this space to rant about a thing that has really gotten way up under my skin ever since Robin Williams' death...

The masterbatory responses to celebrity death that absolutely overtake social media infuriate me.

From the succinct "This one hurts" posts to the rambling accounts of how some wealthy stranger changed your life... I simply cannot deal.

Now, if David Lynch was someone you actually knew, or whose actual presence affected your life... ok. When Robin died, my husband was upset - because he'd KNOWN the guy through one of his close friends who was literally one of Williams' besties. But it was because of that connection that I really started to notice the weird way people reacted with these "new-ish" platforms to literally PERFORM on about how the death of a stranger so greatly impacted their lives.

For me, it just reads as another way to be part of the "in crowd". I loved this artist/musician/actor/celebrity/millionaire, just like everyone else you know did. Yawn. I don't care. You know what I want to read about? How you felt when your Aunt Tilly died. Not some director or sportscaster. I want to read about how a person you actually interacted with may have genuinely helped form the human you are. Tell me everything. Cry. Celebrate. Whatever. (And this is not to discount the fact that music, art, films, etc. help shape who we are - of course they do... but the death of THAT STRANGER has nothing to do with how their work has and will continue to mean whatever it meant to you.)

In a strangely tangential way, this brings ME to sharing "publicly" (to my one follower - hi Nix) for the first time that my brother died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve.

We were not close. He was TECHNICALLY my step-brother and was eleven years my senior. We only ever briefly lived under the same roof a couple times during my childhood and obviously did not have much in common when I was 6 and he was 17 and again when I was 10 and he was 21. I have good and bad memories about him. He was funny. Like. Seriously funny and in the most subtly brilliant ways. But we were never, ya know, pals. (And not for any nefarious reasons - just age and physical distance, really.)

But I chose not to share about his passing on my social media account (where I literally overshare about basically everything I can) because despite him being the metaphorical Aunt Tilly I mentioned above, the reality was, his death STILL did not feel like "mine" to share. My sister Wendy (technically my STEP sister, but one of my best friends in the world) is his actual sister by blood. My other two stepbrothers are his actual brothers by blood. My two nieces are his daughters by blood. The dad I grew up with, my stepdad Gary, is his father by blood. And not one of them shared about their loss on their social accounts...

So it just didn't feel like it was MINE to share. Because I knew that for any of them, seeing ME, the least connected to him in our family, sharing about it would seem strange/hurtful/inappropriate.

Getting back, then, to David Lynch. I can't figure out why this sort of response has become a thing. Do we NOT think about how these responses will affect those who actually knew the deceased? The ones typically asking that their "privacy be respected during this difficult time"? Why do we do this? And even moreso... why don't we celebrate people in this way WHILE THEY'RE STILL HERE even? Both those we know and love and those we idolize?

And this relates to another thing that is yet to come, which I plan to use this new-to-me blog for... talking about death and our relationships, as humans, with it. I have a book I picked up for myself called "Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life" and it is filled with 12 weeks of writing exercises to actually examine our personal relationships with this supposedly taboo subject matter. I was going to get myself a prefect new notebook to take these exercises on, but I decided when I set this blog up yesterday, that I would do that here.

Anyhow. For now that's all I got. End rant, as we used to say on LJ.