October 12, 2009

• The Process Is Suck

  I hate moving.

  No, like, you can take something you strongly dislike, and say, "I hate it," but that's not the same thing.  That's "distate," or "revulsion," or "suck-tastic."  You can loathe it too, but that's different altogether.  Loathing has no love at all.  "Hate" is the flip side of love. 

  And nowhere is that more true than with moving and I.

  I'm not exactly a pack rat.  I don't just accumulate for the sake of accumulating.  But I'm deeply sentimental.  "Mental" being an important part of that word.  Z-man, wisely, keeps trying to tell me, "Sentiment is emotional, not physical."  And that's true.

  But it's not merely sentimentality.  As my mother reminded me, my grandmother, one of the most sentimental people I have ever known, was ruthlessly good at throwing things away, which is sort of out of character from what most people might have thought of her.  It's a Cancer thing (the sign, not the disease).

  No, physical things to which I am attached are a version of personal read-only memory (P-ROM).

  My brain, as certain close friends have remarked, is kind of hard-drive-like.  Recollection is a scan which they physically see happening.

  But I think I'm getting older.  There's been some degredation.  I need a defrag, too.

  Going through my desk tonight (one of my parsed-out goals for purging), I came across correspondence from 20 years ago, before email and blogs were "invented" (or at least popularly accessible).  I forgot how good a letter-writer I was, back in the day -- the day being my freshman and sophomore year of college (1988-1990).

  I've come across things that I instantly knew what they were, why I had them, but weren't really a part of my memory any longer-- possibly the most hilarious being some stickers I got in 1983, when I visited my friend Gary, after he'd moved from Miami to Jupiter, and worked that summer in a photo-developing place (nearly a relic itself).  The stickers were thought- and word-bubbles, like you'd see on the comics page.  They had such witicisms as "Where's the Beef?" and "Girls just want to have fun!" and "I love Rock 'n' Roll!" One was meant to apply these stickers to people in your pictures.  Hilarity ensues. 

  As a bonus, in the sleeve with the remaining few stickers (of which all of the above quotes were found, perhaps proving by their lack of use that I've never been too dreadfully trendy) was a decal sticker of Inky, Blinky, and Clyde, and . . . um . . . the other ghost from Pac-Man.

  See, I can't remember the other ghost's name without that sticker!

  Granted, that's probably not important anymore.  A garbage bag on my floor is positively lined with items about which I've reached the same conclusion.

  So, I'm doing pretty well with the purging.  And there's surely an up-side to throwing away items that you're embarrassed about having now, and I mean that in a non-destroy-the-evidence sort of way.  But I'm not feeling it at the moment.  I feel, at the moment, like I'm losing people and experiences to a general aether of forgetfulness. 

  • 3:10 am
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