we can bury our time capsule in a pothole

I just went for a walk, nominally to buy cigarettes, but mostly because I bought rainboots yesterday and wanted an excuse to walk/stomp in every puddle I encountered. Which is something you should try, by the way. You end up feeling powerful, in a way, especially if you're like me and have spent the past however many years avoiding them. "Fuck you, melting snow!" you can say in your head. Or out loud. Whichever. Anyways, the melting snow and all of the mud and dirt that go with it made me think that if I were to create an Edmonton archive, it would contain the following:

• a taxidermied magpie
• a Roll Up the Rim cup, found on the side of the road
• a broken snow shovel
• photographs of all our friends who've moved away, in memory
• a jar of mud from the river

And we could bury it all in a pothole and wait about fifty years until it gets covered over. All of that is to say, I really don't know what I'd put in an Edmonton archive. Considering that I'd like to be an archivist, you'd think it would be easy. But I actually have no idea. It's hard to decide what's important, isn't it? What seems like it would be at the time might not be, really.

 I keep thinking about that Pine Point documentary, too. I've been looking at the website, and he's got a whole digital archive there of things he's collected himself and from other people. And I really like that idea. I always make fun of scrapbookers -- because do you really not have anything better to do with your time than caption photos of your golden retriever with Comic Sans praises? -- but in a way, they're doing something good. They're collecting their own memories. Creating their own archives, as it were.

Really, I like the idea of personal archives more than official ones, even. Have you ever stopped in one of those dinky little museums you find on the side of the highway sometimes? Curated by an elderly woman who gets super excited when you come in because you're her first visitor in a week? Go in next time you see one. Ostensibly they're about a place, or an event, but a lot of the time it's made up of stuff people have donated. Personal stuff. Letters, photographs. And they put it there maybe because they want to help commemorate something, but also because people are terrified of being forgotten and there's something about sharing such private things. Back to the Pine Point thing -- this guy is so intent on remembering a place that's already been forgotten, really. Because there's really nothing left. Literally nothing left. And I've forgotten where I'm going with this, sorry. But there's beauty in that. I love that archives can be anything. Whatever is important to you, you can collect. I save everything, I love physical objects, my bedroom is a shrine to the past fifteen years. An archive of Sam, as it were. An archeological dig site, if I get lazy and don't clean.

Back to everything/Pine Point/memory, I think that's what I'm going to do for my presentation, actually. Make some sort of collective archive of people, of us, of their and our memories and thoughts about this place at this moment. Oh goodness. I just had a good idea. We'll see if it's workable.

ANYWAYS. I'm slightly drunk, so excuse any "wtf is she even on" moments. And last last thing, speaking of archives, the Provincial Archive is opening for the Rural Alberta Advantage tomorrow night, apparently. So someone said. You might want to check it. It really is fitting, after all.