Mysteries that annoy me because I will never have an answer

I can’t stand not knowing something that I want to know. While growing up, I didn’t have an enormous amount of support when it came to academics, but my saving grace was my inherent curiosity.

I wanted to know stuff. I was obsessed with learning.

This was much harder in the 1980s without the internet. If you wanted to know stuff when I was growing up, you had to find a book by traveling to a library or bookstore and finding the specific page in the particular book that had your answer.

“Who was Calvin Coolidge’s vice president?” was nearly impossible to know in 1986 unless you could get your hands on an encyclopedia.

Which company has the greatest market share in America was virtually unknowable unless you subscribed to and read the Wall Street Journal daily.

Who won the Academy Award for Best Director in 1952 was information known only by cinephiles and the person who won the award.

The ubiquity of information today is a glorious thing.

The ubiquity of disinformation today is a disaster.

Still, as a curious person living in the internet age, there are some things we don’t know, and it annoys me. Questions that remain unanswered and for which we may never have an answer make me crazy.

Not knowing, or not being able to know, is the worst.

For me, these questions include:

What happened to the “Mary Celeste” and the passengers onboard?

What happened to the residents of the Roanoke Island colony?

What is the full story of the assassination of JFK?

What happened to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan?

Does intelligent alien life exist?

What happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight 370?

How has Steely Dan fooled so many people into thinking their music is good?

Did DB Cooper survive his famous jump?

Why do so many people still talk about “Freaks and Geeks?”

Admittedly, I could probably figure out the last one by watching the damn show.