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Notes -
Sounds ominous but really isn’t. My family is an interesting group of people who come from very disparate backgrounds and more or less melded into a common culture, along with the culture of where I grew up. Our extended family is huge and lives all across the country; including relatives who know me but that I’ve never met who live outside the country. And we were always a fairly close knit group of people. Family isn’t important to most Americans but it’s enormously important to us. That said, my parents were two ‘completely’ different people. I used to think they had absolutely no business getting together and don’t know how they stayed married all their lives.
At some point we’re all obliged to move on. I had a serious sit down with some of my younger cousins a few years ago who I’m very close with (they’re more like younger brothers and sisters), after my sibling passed away and told them there will come a time when mom and dad pass away, I will pass away and everyone else around you will become increasingly distant and have their own lives to live. You’ll be standing in a room by yourself, or driving somewhere or doing something and you’ll say to yourself, “… Is that it? Am I supposed to move on as if nothing happened and it’s just another day?… And the answer to that is ‘yes’… Remember the good times we had and don’t forget me. The sun will still rise tomorrow whether you’re prepared for it or not, and you always have to keep moving forward. So don’t anchor your life around me. Maybe we’ll see each other in Heaven and if not it won’t matter, so take comfort in the fact that we’re all going to the same place.”
Recording was something we began a decade or so ago and when one of my cousins, some of my friends I had a 5 hour or so conversation and I’d laughed hard about something we were discussing. I probably laughed harder than I have in my entire life. My face was red. I had uncontrollable tears. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t talk or breathe. And I remember the next day wishing I could relive our discussion because of how great it was. Then I remembered GrapheneOS has a record button in the Dialer app. My VoIP numbers also can auto-record calls in Groundwire or Sipnetic. I told them in advance what I thought about doing and they agreed to it. Since then we’ve discussed everything under the sun. Family politics. Hood politics. Old memories. Trying to organize and plan things which anymore is extremely difficult for us. Religion. Current events. Movies. Everything.
Try it sometime. You may like it. But there are also serious things people have been wanting to know for a long time that my cousins and I have discussed that we think is best to settle and table it for the next generation of our families. What they do with it at that point is up to them. They’ll definitely get a kick out of many of our conversations if they listen to them. There will be plenty of laughs, raised eyebrows, close calls and holy shit moments to keep them entertained. We have thousands and thousands of hours recorded at this point.
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