Socioeconomic

Last week I was given pause to consider something.

I saw a family with a house that was large, concrete and solid. The land the house is on is not owned; in fact, they went to a lawyer to fight the landowner for prescriptive rights (squatter's rights) based on their statement that they had not paid rent for 16 years. They're trying to claim 3.5 acres of land where their house, their shop and their parking area for their pickup and car, both of which are in good condition. The land itself is a sea of grass and has been for some time. But these are the rights that they are trying to express through a lawyer - that they should own the land for nothing because they've been delinquent in their rent for some time. They'll shout in front of the police, give death threats over the phone and then suddenly become very passive aggressive when they find that their case is likely in trouble. Or expensive. Or both.

So suddenly they talk to the land owner about buying the land.

Later I found myself carefully picking my way through a landscape of fig trees and shadowbenny, completely clear. Not one weed in sight. I come to a half-shack, a lean-to in the area kept immaculate. Inside is a woman who is considered legally insane; she laughs and talks about her certificate and yet... she's there. A bit odd, but there. She'll sing songs in Hindi, recall calypso from forgotten times and enjoy the squish of the mud between her toes as her body convulses in thought.

A stack of dried wood rests atop two concrete foundation blocks that have sank in the dirt; rusty galvanize is carefully laid atop so that the holes do not let a passing cloud dampen the wood. There is no money here, but the place is as immaculate as one could expect.

Despite all my pictures on Flickr, there is a large gap of my life that is without images. From the age of 10 to 35, almost no images of me exist - and those 25 years have a lot of memories. A lot of friends in different parts of the world. A lot of people would have called me a misfit during those years - even a freak at times. The long hair years, the short hair years, the 'go fast' years, the sleeping on the couch and floor years.

They were good years. I made so many good friends in those years, especially from 17 to 30. Some of them were swallowed whole by the digital divide - at times, a name will come to me and I'll search for them on the web, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. They're gone. Its almost as though they never existed. So when I read this article, it really hit home. Nowadays, most of my friends are a part of the digital circle to some degree. My mother, on fixed income, is in some of these circles and thrives in some of them like Flickr. But ol' Marc, my roommate and Arby's junkie? Gone like so many others.

They don't exist except in my memory. I don't expect them to be dead, mind you, but for all intents and purposes these people do not exist on the Internet. For all I know, they're working the same dead end jobs we were all fighting to avoid. They might be married now with little ones running around, and I daresay that I think a few of them may be behind bars. None of them were bad people, mind you, but some of us made bad choices (including me). Some bad choices just lead to other bad choices. Life goes on.