I was looking around for some of my old external hard drives yesterday. I'm trying to put together some photos on an electronic picture frame for my Mom for Mothers Day, old memories and the like. Something to cheer her up and all that.

External hard drives are wild to me. My Dad brought home some old hard drives from his job at Seagate in the early 90s a few times and they were gigantic things that held maybe 10mb of storage. In 1999, my Dad got me a kick ass desktop computer, a Pentium 233mhz with a 3dfx gpu and about 1gb of storage. It was epic.

It was around 2006 or so that my Dad brought home a 100gb external drive. I mostly used it to store all the mp3s I'd been collecting and some movies and shows I'd pirated. At some point it crashed and I lost a bit but was able to replace most everything.

In 2015 or so, a friend of mine gave me some old external drives she had, which allowed me to expand my music storage quite a bit, and I started storing comics as well. I came into a fortune of hard drives after getting into IT, but by this point I was living in a civilization that encouraged me to mostly keep to YouTube and Spotify, though I've been reconsidering that dependency a lot lately due to the overall criminal behavior of their management.

So I stumbled onto some of my old drives yesterday while looking around. I saw a bunch of old pictures I don't look at too often. Saw pics from a date I had in Spring of 2014 with someone who could never figure out who I was to her. Then again, maybe I couldn't figure it out either. It's funny, but I felt like I looked older in those pics than I do now.

Back in those days I was so desperate to be larger than life. Like all the ordeals I'd gone through (lol) had to be for something, like I had to work a thousand times harder than anyone just to make it all worth it. I look at my smile sitting on the face of the cocky arrogant jet engine I was, and I see all the cracks. I see all the terror, all the fear of things to come on their countenance.

I was so very desperate not to be a loser. Was it inevitable I would be? Was there something I was missing that would have avoided all the pain that was to follow? Was I doomed to the prophecy handed down by the teachers of my youth?

Well, everything I was afraid would happen came to pass. Every single thing. And I ended up a loser drinking myself to death lamenting for a dozen lost pasts.

The thing about prophecies though, is they only say what will happen and not a word more.

There's nothing left to hide now. I was afraid of being a loser back then and after being one for a while...

Well, what's the big deal?

The world ended and life went on. Everything I was afraid of ended up happening and now that it's happened... it's happened.

My smile is surer now, steadier, brighter. That's what everyone says, and it's what I can see.

Anna says that age can sometimes be nonlinear. That we can discover and live our youth in our old ages, and can fall into ancient desperation in childhood. I've found my youth after giving in to the reality of time's inevitable crawl.

As I was going through this dusty drive full of memories, I realized how much of my music tastes I've forgotten. I went looking for my music but found it wasn't on the drive I'd left it on anymore. I was a bit disheartened, like I'd lost a part of myself.

Actually it turned out I moved it to a newer drive sometime around 2021 and even put a helpful label on it since I knew myself well enough to know I'd forget.

Not a bad move for a supposed loser.

I forgot how much I listened to music on Newgrounds, how some of these were practically anthems for myself once upon a time. Also I guess I had a Kylie Minogue phase at some point. I recently rediscovered how much I loved Nu Metal once upon a time, but there's a lot in here I just straight up forgot was a part of me.

One of my favorite anime series is Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. In one of the scenes, the characters are discussing some fairly complex philosophical theory in order to figure out the plot, and one of the characters states he needs an external memory module to keep up with the conversation. The show asked a lot of questions about how much of us is us and how much is the technology we are coming to depend upon.

A lot of myself lies on these old external storage drives. How the world looked, how it sounded, how I used to be.

Some folks like to live in the present, they see no value in who they were before. Wouldn't that kind of courage be a lovely thing to possess? Now isn't so bad, but I can't ever shake the perception of how the past shapes the moment. Am I chained to it for that?

I look into the eyes of that much older Jacob from a decade ago and see how much they shuddered in fear of the future. I can't exactly blame them. How much terror lies in my own future?

Then again, maybe I've already had the worst day of my life. If that's the case, what's left to be afraid of? And if there really is something worse waiting for me somewhere down the line, will I look back on pictures of me now and marvel? Am I the best of myself now?

Perhaps the only thing I know for sure is if there are parts of me stored externally, maybe I should back them up.