proustian raze i was having a conversation with this woman, he said. she was talking about her search for the meaning of life. i told her she was wasting her time looking for something that couldn't be found. she didn't like hearing that. the problem is you're looking for an answer outside of yourself, when the answer is already within you. you're asking the wrong question. you create your own meaning, right? maybe it's just because i'm recognizing my mortality for the first time, but i'm very aware now that i have a finite number of minutes left. i don't know how many more i've got. it could be five. it could be five million. i've been trying to read this book by marcel proust. you heard of him? some people consider it the best book ever written. it's called "in search of lost time". it's written in a very florid way, like a lot of things were in the early nineteen hundreds. i had to watch a few youtube videos just to figure out what the hell he was saying. but i think i'm starting to get it now. the book's more than four thousand pages long. it's taken me about a month to get to where i am now. i'm on page sixty-four. the whole point of the thing, i think, is that time is man's greatest enemy. we're all trying to conquer an unconquerable foe. you have all this history already behind you. and so much of it is gone. there are things that happened twenty years ago that felt like the end of the world at the time, and you've forgotten everything about them. that's the way memory works. you forget the things you want to remember, and you hold onto the things you wish you could forget. but proust talks about hearing a fly buzzing outside his bedroom window. and that reminds him of a day from his childhood. and that opens up a door to images and moments he thought were lost forever. and in reliving those moments through the lens of the present, they're filtered through all the lived experience that came after those memories were made and misplaced, shifting and changing shape along the way. so nothing's ever really lost. you only have to know where to look for it. 230529 what's it to you? who go blather from