Power over the Past

I deleted one of my recent blog entries today. Just now, actually. It was easy. I brought it up, reread it, cringed, hit delete. It was a pathetic, poorly written cry for help from an overprivileged whiner, in the tradition of the novels that William Dean Howells used to write about the unhappiness of the very fortunate: tragedies of the broken teacup, as some wag put it.

But that’s not important. What’s important is how easy it was. With a single click of my mouse, requiring far less energy than it takes to coax my heart into a single beat, I wiped away an embarrassing part of my past. Just like that. It was marvelous. Now I know the sharp thrill that must have traveled down the spines of the Stalinist bureaucrats who removed all of those murdered unworthies from old pictures; now I know the secret joy of the rightist punditry who keep telling us that the Reagan years were a glorious time and a ringing vindication of the theory of supply-side economics. Now I know power.

The next step is to figure out how to do it in real life. I’ll start with my entire high school career, and most of college. I’ll leave the bit where I met my wife, of course, and some of the good times with my various roommates, and the better English classes, but the rest — all the compsci courses, all the lonely nights studying for calculus exams that I was doomed to fail anyway, all the wasted hours playing Sega Hockey — go. And I’ll definitely can that early, humiliating interview with Microsoft for a summer job. I certainly don’t need that clanking around in my head.

The possibilities are endless. All I’ve got to do is find the delete button.