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Rainy night in Shanghai.

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I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack.

My plane touched down in Shanghai about a month ago. Everything has been a blur since then. I think I’ve found a reliable way to penetrate the Golden Shield, so hopefully I’ll be in touch more often.

The photos were old and washed out. A red Kodak haze had begun to creep into the images, smoothing out details that been captured long ago. They were snapshots of Paris, taken by my grandfather during a trip he took in 1979. My grandmother gave them to me with the hope that I could save the memories before they were lost forever.

Fortunately, I had a mouse and keyboard at my fingertips. I scanned the photos into my computer and began to cut through the haze so she could see what my grandfather saw. These images are only fragments of his trip to Paris – and they were nearly lost – but they will live forever as a series of ones and zeros.

I had a hammer in one pocket and a fistful of nails in the other. The hot molasses sun pressed down against us. We skated on cracked asphalt paths that wound through forests and around playgrounds. I’m no stranger to spraying paint on concrete, but this time we were leaving our mark on nature itself. We were filling the forest with plastic animals.

A pixelated owl is perched midway up a slender pine tree, silently observing a busy intersection. An 8-bit worm slithers along a set of wooden stairs. The YOMAN idly addresses passersby while waiting to be swallowed by the bark that surrounds him.

A few days later, I went for a long run through the forest. Eventually I encountered a deer – a real one. I stopped to stare. The deer stared back. I started to dance. The deer kept staring. Plastic cats and birds held up by steel nails watched us from above.

Odd Future came to town in May. The venue was small and the air smelled like sweat. Earl was still missing. When the beat dropped, Tyler dived headfirst into the crowd and a gang of middle fingers erupted towards the ceiling. We thrashed as one. Security couldn’t hold back the sea of box logos. Fuck them for trying. We’re fucking radical.
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I’ve got a thousand ghosts on the Internet – or at least that’s how it feels right now. I try to keep track of all the digital shadows I cast, but often find myself overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of data associated with each one. At times, it’s as if slivers of my being have decided to follow their own meandering trajectories through cyberspace.

A few weeks ago, I scrolled to the beginning of my Facebook wall and began to delete every post that had been deposited there over the last five years. I was a genuine Internet Ghostbuster, intent on removing some of the ectoplasm my digital selves had left splattered across the WWW for everyone to see. I began to delete post after post. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had accidentally stumbled into a trove of nostalgia and forgotten memories.

This was self-reflection in PHP code, or something like that. I felt like I was gazing into a shadow that had long been cut off from my body. The shape I cast five years ago looked strange and unfamiliar, but I could still vaguely make out my own form. It was strange though, because the shape I saw had emerged through the words of others.

Everything that is shared online leaves behind afterimages that continue to resonate at their own persistent frequencies. Scrolling backwards through a Facebook wall or a Twitter feed is an exercise in introspection. I was reminded of old friendships and lost connections. Czars of the underworld and milfmen. Made for TV assholes and the time I made Thanksgiving tacos. If I look hard enough, I can probably trace whatever path I have wandered over the years, but so can anyone else with access to my data.

Do I regret deleting my memories? Not really. The important ones will stick with me and the rest will continue to haunt server farms in the middle of nowhere. It’s not really possible to delete anything from the Internet, but I’ll still try to reclaim myself, pixel by pixel.

I used a document scanner to make this self-portrait in January. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I was fading away or coming back into focus. I guess I’m still not really sure.