I spent a long time cleaning and re-ordering yesterday. The results probably don’t look all that different to the untrained eye – the stacks littered here and there are shorter and sturdier, and the flat surfaces on which they rest are now dust-free and lemon-scented. I think our greatest household invention is not air-conditioning or screen doors, but the flat surface. People like me would be so lost without them.
But a lot of hidden clutter has been swept away. I delivered a great feast to the paper shredder yesterday as I went through the desk drawer where I’ve been stuffing “records” for years with only the most sporadic attempts at organization. Just to show you how haphazard my filing has been: some of the folder tabs were still the ones written by Wrong Fiancee #2 – I broke up with her in 2004.
What didn’t help my scattery brain at all is that while school did teach me about the musical circle of fifths and the symbolism of the character name “Muley Graves” in The Grapes of Wrath (hint: He’s stubborn and doomed), it did not teach me how long I should hold onto financial records in modern American society. Mathematically, this is not only simpler to learn than the quadratic equation, but far more useful to most people. But this time, rather than just lament my lack of knowledge, I went and looked it up for myself.
I was hanging on to A LOT that I did not need. Cell phone bills, old receipts, pay stubs – I found one dating back to my job at the Peoria Journal Star; in 1999.
These numbers tell a shadowplay story of my life over the last decade. They tell me about the guest lecture income I used to get from Columbia College, all those business lunches in Century City and Beverly Hills, the phone calls I made late at night to certain numbers, the celebratory havoc created when I sold the screenplay, the long dreadful crash that followed. They describe my travels, my relationships, the places I worked – it would be easy to start thinking it’s an amazing record of my existence, and maybe shouldn’t be so hastily shredded.
But really they’re just numbers and data – they’re only useful to the extent that my personal memories can vibrate them to life. And my memory will only last so long – already it leaks and compresses and re-interprets as it tries to crush my lengthening life into a useful summary equation.
All these receipts say is that I saw a movie at such-and-such theatre on such a date. But that conveys nothing about the experience, about what the movie was, who I was with, and how did both make me feel. For that, we are all much better enlightened by the review I wrote of that movie.
By the end of the day yesterday, I was filled with an immense gratitude that I blog. I know there’s maybe 10-15 people at most who even read this stuff with any kind of regularity. But even if no one read, it is so enriching to me to have these stories and pictures at my fingertips – each captured in all the myopic hackish awkwardness of the moment. It is better than a record that I existed, it is a reminder that I lived.