“Historians, it is said, fall into one of three categories:
Those who lie.
Those who are mistaken.
Those who do not know.”
Anonymous

History is such an interesting thing. Though it’s not really the case, it appears that you have to have done something interesting to have one. People are constantly trying to leave their mark on the world to remind people that they were there. Families are having enough children to staff a football team (I don’t know how many that is, but I’m assuming Octomom over-shot it); kids are spray-painting their names on every flat surface; men and women are trying to populate walls with their artwork and shelves with their stories; but seriously, aren’t serial killers the only names we can rattle off on command?

Recently the Fever Jones re-introduced me to the History Channel and I’ve been watching a show called “Life After People”. The show doesn’t explain how or why people disappeared, but just how the world will look from 1 day to 50 million years after people disappear. It’s fascinating. After just a day , things start to break down. Even the 10,000 year clock doesn’t last ten years because it was only a prototype and they never got the money to build the real one. Skyscrapers crumble and water, it appears, it the death of any structure.

There was a story about a professor who left a steel encased, air-tight room in a university building with the instructions that it shouldn’t be opened until 8313 AD (or some such nonsense). The room was filled with objects that would should those in the future what we were like. Amongst the entombed items were mannequins to show how we appeared, a typewriter, and some vials full of beer (made, of course, by Anheuser). They found that doorway covered in spiderwebs only 30 years later. After only 30 years, nobody even remembered about the room and, were the instructions not on the door, nobody would’ve understood what was going on.  As for the 8313, the audience could watch as a trickle of water ended up bringing down the building around the steel room and then began on a microscopic imperfection that came about during that fall.  I think the room made it almost 250 years.

My high school time capsule, opened at the 10 year reunion revealed that I was most known for wearing mass quantities of Polo (not bad in a town devoid of  cologne).  Of course that and the fact that I was a suspected homosexual.  Small towns are a good time.  But after all these years and the masses of people I’ve collected and kept over the years, I do have to wonder how I’ll go down in history.  “Funny Uncle Alan” to the children of all my best friends; only to be forgotten in a couple of generations?  Cranky old Mr. Pierce who refuses to make eye contact with the neighborhood children or the homeless so they’ll go away?  Or do I have a mass killing in my future?  Alan Dean Pierce.  Hmm.  Perhaps I should write a book instead.

“There is properly no history, only biography.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson