A handful of history

Yeesh - life comes at you from some unexpected, innocuous directions.

I've been cleaning up my 'office,' the third bedroom of this domicile, because it's an unruly dump and I can find fewer and fewer legitimate reasons to blame it on someone else. During my housekeeping, I came to address the dreaded Accordion File.

This file has been with me since Utah (making the sign of the cross as I write - not bad for an Atheist), and it contains some of the oldest artifacts of my life, on paper and otherwise. It's been a catch-all for many of my file-able relics. I figured I'd shake out all the old shit and move all the keepables to a more-modern vessel. Hoo, was I mistaken.

Starting from the front, the very first gaggle of items I pull strike at me like the coiled ghost of a snake. They are the invoices from a washer/dryer I got on credit with an ex. I am as unsentimental about that relationship as any I've ever had - it was nearly as doomed as the one in Utah, but didn't produce children, making it markedly less traumatic. And yet I am hesitant to discard its remnants, largely because of the way my brain works.

I am completely unable to track things in a temporal fashion. I don't track the years well at all, and my memory is not linear. What memories survive the beer are filed in podlike pockets and in no particular order. If something makes the cut, it floats buoyantly in a meaningless mental mucus (ick, I know, how do you think I feel?), without regard for nor identification of time.

Once I started blogging, this was no big deal. However, everything before that seriously risks being completely detached from my mental timeline and I'll avail myself of any system that allows me the means to sort out who did what when. This stuff comes in handy now & then and it's troubling when you can't pin things down.

Back to the point of my already-dull blog post: stabbed not in the heart but in the forehead by documents from days gone by, I tucked them back into their dusty, carboard tomb and shrank back to whatever busywork I busied myself with before. I'm not sure I'm ready to discard these breadcrumbs just yet, and they may be filed as well as they need to be as is.