Put behind

Sometimes the internet is just uncanny. It seems unbound by time or space. I can open a geocities webpage and it will look as good as it did in 1999. News is always news, the archives always with us. It reaches into other media as well, uprooting them from their context and putting them on display. I watched Wallace and Ladmo online last week. I haven't seen it since the 1980s because it hasn't been broadcast since the 1980s. As I watched Gerald be a jerk to our heroes, it gave me a funny feeling, like suddenly looking at the primordial ooze from which life sprang and recognizing it for itself and not as a metaphor.
Now that I gave into facespace, all sorts of space and time are collapsing. People I've only known for two weeks are suddenly my virtual friends. People I haven't seen or heard from in 10 years are back in my "life". I enjoy this to an extent, because I'm either (pessimistically) a gossip and voyeur or (optimistically) genuinely care about people. But another part of me wishes I didn't know the rest of the story. I wish my old roommates were still twenty, and that they hadn't gone through the trauma of divorce, that they didn't have the heartache of infertility, that their children and spouses were completely healthy and their finances secure. Part of this is selfish on my part. I fear growing up because I fear death.
But death is carefully recorded online as well. In my brother's list of friends on facespace was a certain young man from our neighborhood growing up. He was around my brother's age, so quite a bit older than I was. He was large so he was intimidating as a child, but also because you had a sense that he was something special. He became an actor and I saw him as a teenager in Shakespeare plays with the local theatre troupe. I last saw him in a play at the G.O.D. University in 2004 when he was doing his graduate work in theater. From his facespace page I found out in the last five years he had graduated, taught at the college in Arizona, married, been diagnosed with cancer and died in January. His page is now a shrine. It linked to a cancer blog, with optimistic entries that wait to be recalled by its readers if never to be renewed by its author. It was shocking yet poignant.
Out of my primordial soup of childhood memories emerged the story involving him. To earn his eagle, he collected recyclable goods from people in the neighborhood to take to be recycled and donate the money earned to . . What was he going to do with the money? I can't say, because the punchline of the story is that he took the other members of the troop to the local convenience store and bought them treats for helping him. Using the money he (with their help) had just earned. I thought that was so funny as a kid. It became a classic, although I loved the punchline so much I obviously forgot many of the details. I don't think I knew why I liked it so much or why I still like it. It's so marvelously ironic. But somehow it wouldn't have been as delicious if it had been another one of my brother's friends. Does the story display his indifference to doing things how society told him to and yet being innocent enough to genuinely do what he wanted to?
I don't know. I'm not sure I'm ready to know. So he sinks back into my childhood, now with accompanying avatar and story. Other people emerge and tell me their stories; what space and time distanced is suddenly brought make to the near present, at least in the diorama of the internet.