Lost in both time and space, I was visited this morning by an Australian named Mick whom I met in Europe in 1998. He appeared on my desktop — perhaps in a paranoid vision, or perhaps just as an icon in MSN Messenger — and we had a forty-five minute chat on the subtleties of not keeping in touch with people we hardly know at all.

Nineteen-ninety eight seems so long ago when you bring actual living people into the timeframe, and don’t just measure it as a vague sort of halucination of “how I spent my last five summer vacations.” (Jeff will feel really bad. That was a full year and some AFTER we roomed at the University.) Mick has metamorphosed (apparently) from crazy Australian, European touring and drinking-buddy-of-mine — tied to an illusion of wandering the streets of Rome, Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam with we and others — to family man and full time hard working citizen of his far-away country. Not that there was ever any doubt.

But all the same. We anchor our memories to static versions of certain people, and then move on with our lives hoping that — maybe like photographs — those people will always be there to go back and reference and help us to recall lost moments ago.

Fortunately — unfortunately — quasi-fortunately — they all change, and move on, tripping though a few years here and a few years there to wind up to where we stumble across their paths at some point in the future.

Markian (Remember him? Someone did a search for him on Google today, and found this site. Odd.) noted, while in a phone conversation last week — perhaps in an excuse, but possibly in a moment of insight — that the human brain is only really meant to keep really good track of about thirty or forty people, total. When you account for family and a handful of those needed close friendships, that doesn’t leave many slots for good people like Mick.

(Did anyone notice I started AND ended that last paragraph with the names of two completely different and opposite people, and both those names start with the letter ‘M’?)

I don’t make excuses for keeping in touch with people — or alternatively, not keeping in touch with people. In a way, that whole ideology justifies this: lost.in.vancouver What is this but a fragment of something so that somewhere in the world my head sticks slightly higher above the crowds and — in the raging mosh-pit of life — makes it a little easier for those lost souls to possibly remember me.

Or maybe I’m just a little too philosphical tonight.