I remember when I was a kid, I was digging through a box of my family’s old cassette tapes. I found the usual: Schubert, Schumann, Bach, Handel, Mozart… and a copy of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, both cassettes. I listened to it once or twice, wondering whose it was. When I caught my mother singing along the “My Sweet Lord” I realized it must have been hers a long time ago, back when she still had long hair and played guitar and sang folksongs.

Anyway, as a kid I resolved to listen to it again. I didn’t really understand it, but tonight, listening to the tracks that I downloaded and then copied to my minidisc player, I discovered this wonderful album.

So I realized that the Internet isn’t just a window on the present, but also on our own pasts. We can summon up any ghost from the past that strikes our fancy, hear or see it. We can delve into things we thought were long gone. It’s wonderful, this strange jalopy Net of ours.

If only my computer wouldn’t keep breaking down…

By the way, tonight, I also enjoyed Beck’s Sea Change and it totally fit the evening. Songs of painful loss of love, recovery, and freedom. I met my ex-girlfriend and I discovered that we could be friends, talk honestly and help one another. It was good for me, maybe for her too. Now I think I can go to Jeonju with a good feeling in my heart, though still with a feeling of loss at all the good friends I leave behind, and the life I leave here in this little town I’ve come to feel is like another home to me.