Foolish thoughts (abandoning your past)
» My Life is an Open Blog
Sometimes the oddest memories resurrect themselves from know discernable cause.
Many years ago when I was in the Eden County, North Carolina jail for trying to cash someone else's stock dividend checks I decided I'd change my name and move to where no one knew me.
I was going to call myself Jeremy Salem (ouch!) and move to Seattle or Portland. Neither city was in the hip continuum (as far as I know) back then. They were as far away as I could go and stay in the US (I didn't appreciate Holland back then, and probably was too lazy to learn Dutch anyway).
My illusion was that by abandoning my past I'd somehow be more able to forge a better life. Laziness aside I realized I couldn't do it because I couldn't survive without the few valuable friendships I had (and wouldn't dare tell them what my new name was).
Of course now I see my past as the source of my current self. A continuous progression (that isn't always progress) that sometimes presents itself as a sequence of quanta.
Another reason to wish I could watch myself in a parallel dimension and see what the change would've led to. Probably a return to Atlanta and life as merely Richard Evans Lee.
