How Bill Became A Footnote

The thing that strikes me odd about blogs is that they live temporarily, in a disconnected way. And people can dart about in a most peculiar manner given their momentary distraction or even a nanosecond's worth of interest.

There are real intellectuals blogging who have something important to say, ongoing every single day. My favorite, Rob Horning ... wow ... I read him every single day. His musings always strike deep in my emotional and intellectual wellbeing and I sense a resonance within my very core. But I can dart about like a gnat, too. His discussion today on communication encouraged me to look at my sitemeter.

And what I found -- I mean generally I can barely remember when or what I was writing or thinking about, this blog thing doesn't have an index I can use even if I wanted to, and all the people who still read here (that is, what I laughingly refer to as my reading audience) probably think I have been blowing smoke at them about all those famous names I have encountered who might or might not have had an impact on me, but they at least had enough influence so that I remember their names. Or sometimes I think they might think I am lying, or twisting things up purposefully, or something, or I'm just a goof tripping out or a looney tune fantasizing, but basically I've decided what I've believed all along, that no one really gives a shit, and certainly people don't give a shit about anything other than what they're currently interested in. But the sitemeter this morning reminded me I wished there was such a thing as footnotes to this blog.

So I'm going to post a couple of links here that are connected today because someone was looking for a name (and unbeknownst to me, someone like me was writing about that near unknown person in 2003, a fact I did not find out until a few moments ago!) As the researcher I used to be, and I was a heady intellectual once upon a time, both facile and articulate and dedicated that way, with a large maybe colorful and sometimes pretentious vocabulary, there's a part of me that says that's logical.

This morning, I say "isn't that amazing!!!" That an idea or scrap of memory about a person can get a person, even one single person, into some kind of motion, even if for a moment or two, even if they're sitting on their butt as intellectuals are known to do and they sit on their butts at great length, longer than people who are watch tv everyday do)

Didn't This Machine Used to Only Kill Fascists?
How Folk Music Can Kill or Be Killed

And today! (Hurrah!) Bill Becomes A Footnote in History! (Just like he probably always thought he might be), in a reference entitled:

"Attached is from Gerrit Dommerholt, International HD Associatio [thanks Gerrit]! Paper is from the Gateway November/December 2003 (Newsletter Australian Huntington’s Disease Association (NSW): Woody Guthrie and Huntington Disease. This brief account of Woody Guthrie is instructive to clinical geneticists. It tells the story of one famous man's understanding of and struggle with Huntington's disease."

(And I'll be damned, squeezed in there is Bill.)

"Children
From the first marriage:
1. Gwendolyn Gail (Gwen) Guthrie ("Teeny"), born 11-1935, died 1976.
2. Sue Guthrie, born 1937, died 1989.
3. Will Rogers (Bill) Guthrie, born 1939, died 1960, car crashed against railroad in California."

[Well, you don't get much of a sense of who Bill was or what he might have been up to just from his name in a list, do you, unless you have a vivid imagination.]  ¶ 7/13/2006 06:45:00 AM