Really not doing well on this daily posting shtick.

[matt_doyle]

My life isn't that busy at the moment, though the lack of money is making it stressful (and thankfully, I'm in an upcoming pharmaceutical study which ought to take the edge of my money woes significantly). But the majority of my roommates are either prepping for finals week or past finals and graduating this semester, so I think some of the crazy time-deprivation has rubbed off on me. Starting in a week or two, things should be calmer, which will hopefully have a positive effect on my reliability and timeliness.

Anyway. Making a post simply to apologize for not posting seems a rather pointless exercise, so I suppose I ought to find something to discuss.

I'm a packrat. I've spent some time today cleaning out the Inbox of my old yahoo mail account, the one I used from age 13 or 14 until last year (technically, I still use it - for facebook notifications and chatting on Yahoo Messenger). I had 2700 messages in my inbox when I started - and I sort mail into subfolders when I can, so at a guess that's over 4k total messages. 400ish a year. More than one email received every day, on average, that I felt was worth saving.

In my apartment are boxes full of notebooks. They date back about as far as the emails do -- they'd date back further, but the paper pretty much starts falling apart at that point, or the pencil lead has gotten too smudged to read. Most of these notebooks don't even have a single story in them. Many of them just have story seeds, or single lines of dialogue, or mental images I wanted captured - one per page, seventy or so per notebook. The last time I counted my notebooks was when I first moved up to college, nearly 7 years ago. Then, I had something approaching sixty. Now... well, I've gotten exponentially more prolific over the past few years (though nowhere close to the level I want to get to).

It's a big number. A lot of dead trees, a lot of flipped bits of data (or whatever). Most of which, I freely admit, I may never even look at again. And yet, bringing myself to part with it is nigh impossible. I'm not a materialistic guy; it's not the acquisition of stuff I care about.

It's the ideas. Even discarded, even when I sneer or cringe when looking at them, even then I want to keep them, for the map they show me of what I was thinking and feeling, how my brain was working, who I was back then. Sound and fury, signifying nothing, most likely. But the Romance of the Record seduces me every time - the tangibility of my history. The evidence chamber of my mental precinct house, and half a dozen metaphors even more strained.

A lot of these saved emails, these notebook scribbles, (these LJ posts, here and on my old journal), are recursively introspective - they're talking about how I have changed as a person, how I look back, how I collect, how I build myself. I think this one may be the most meta, talking about talking about myself, but still.

It's worth doing, this forensic examination of shed snakeskins. That's what I'm trying to say, and having difficulty justifying. I learn from it. It calms me, grounds me, keeps me thinking about what I do and how and why I do it. By charting a course from past to present, it gives me a notion about the future (probably not a very good one). My interest in the discussion, however it turns in on itself, is one of the few things that doesn't change from one examination to the next.

Does this provoke thought in anyone but me?

Comments

[esc-azkaban.livejournal.com]

I think I'm the exact OPPOSITE in this respect, I burn and or toss/shred any evidence of past writing (unless even I think it's worth keeping ... very, very rare or holds immense sentimental value) almost compuslively.

I have no idea why. I guess as a child I was always fascinated with the idea of appearing from nowhere, with no record and no past. I planned out in painstaking detail (all in my head) what I'd do to escape my life - the buses and trains I'd take, the disguises, how I'd make decisions - and I always arrived at the conclusion that I'd like to someday make a journey with no plan at all, and no set end date. I'd like to make all my decisions chaotically, randomly, as free from reason and intellect as I could manage.

I always thought that if I managed that ... I would never be found because I couldn't be predicted.

[matt_doyle]

That's really cool (and this comment is really late).

And, ironically, it gives me a few ideas I want to jot down as notes for a potential story...

[dragondances.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who also carts around boxes of Records of things, I can empathize. My Records aren't all writing; they're mostly the notes and stories and poems and everything that I was interested in whenever I collected them. But I can understand the idea of charting an idea of self based on what you were and have become up to this point.

I feel bad about the lost paper and space. I'm also often frustrated at my collecting, since I really don't want to become like my Grandmother and keep every tiny piece of junk. But sorting through my old things is calming... I'm a fan of nostalgia, I guess.

[matt_doyle]

Nostalgia is a good thing.

[elf-amazon.livejournal.com]

Have you considered making a journal or something where you can rerecord some of that stuff in those notebooks? I mean, obviously you'd wind up keeping some of the more present stuff, and there're probably some so smudged that you can't read it anymore... But it might help if you could electronically record some of it in a place where it won't get lost, where it's easily organized via memories or tags, and then you won't lose them, you can find what you want when you want it, and the notebooks can be recycled - they won't constitute fully a third of your current library.

[celebros.livejournal.com]

This is pretty much what I was going to say, too, so *seconded*.

Sort of like organizing all of Grandma Betty's letters for the past 40 years... e.g. if you decide to do this and want some help, I'm all over it this summer.

[matt_doyle]

I would definitely want help with such a project.

[matt_doyle]

You, me, and Teresa should collaborate on this over the summer.

[elf-amazon.livejournal.com]

'M up for that. <3

[matt_doyle]

YAY