Needs change, and transclusion comes to the rescue. We arrived at the 361 page mark to discover that for the most part the experiment worked in ways that couldn’t have been anticipated:

1. Too Damn Much. For me to keep track of, or organize, in any meaningful way. Hierarchies became obsolete before they were completed, and hyperlink webs, in spite of how manageable and easy to create they are in wiki, can’t indicate the value of one path over another. Which leaves text searches. They may make billions for Google, but they’re not really useful with my own stuff. Call it a quirk of the memory: if I remember what specific word I used, I remember enough of the whole thing that I don’t need to search for it. If I don’t remember what word I used, I can’t find it except by blind luck.

2. Too Damn Obvious. May be a correlary of the have-it-all-or-not-at-all phenomenon, or a product of too damn much writing, but I could always tell if someone else had fiddled with the final product. Major or minor alterations. I know my style and my life better than anyone else.

3. Too Damn Confusing. I find that I’m relatively alone in this preoccupation with the silent artillery of memory, or at least with my secret suspicion that what I remember is made unreliable by just about everything, including my own damn memory. And the notion that the past is so malleable is pretty foreign, I think, to most people.

So, now, as they say, for something entirely different. All the old things will be here, rooting around and squeaking amongst themselves in the database, and you may see them from time to time, or if you look carefully enough, but what you must know is that though they look exactly the same they have come to mean something quite different.