Having just finished a few hours scanning through a few decades of photos stored on my external hard drive, It is probably a good time to share this post that I drafted late one night last week. . . , or last month, or last year. Or some other time.
I suppose my first clear recollection of this lifelong character flaw was in 7th grade. I came home after school one day, picked up a blank reporters notebook and a ballpoint pen. Then I took a stack of 33 lps of classical music and put them on the turntable, hit start and began to write. Free verse, blank verse, some kind of verse. And I wrote until the music stopped or I ran out of paper - I forget which. Point is I sort of lost track of the notebook. I have stumbled across it a few times in the last 50 or 60 years. Amazed each time that I had it in my hands again. And then promptly mislaid it again.
It is a strange flaw that, if I had a shrink, I would certainly bring to his or her attention. It has grown more pronounced as the world has become more purely digital. A bit of Sharon Vaughn’s classic country song, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys goes like this:
“Pickin' up hookers instead of my pen,
I let the words of my youth fade away.”
Well, hookers have never been part of my existence, but I can certainly relate to the fear of losing “the words of my youth” or the words of my middle age, or the words of my golden years, or any of my words. It’s not that my words are all worth enshrining on vellum in blue or blue-black ink, as Miss Manners would instruct us for important correspondence, but occasionally there is some good stuff there that I would like to keep.
So I have become a digital hyper-saver. I have a DropBox account - maybe two and I compose and save these Wall posts in Evernote, as well as saving copies in a separate file, before publishing them through Blogger where they are also saved. And then there is my stand-alone 8TB hard drive on which I save, not only back-ups of those files, but every time I get a new computer I copy the entire hard drive onto my stand alone drive. I think I have copies of about 5 different hard drives stashed there. And we aren’t taking just Wall files, we are talking correspondence, art, music, poetry, research papers, books, etc. If I created it and it exists in digital form, it is on that drive. And as I mentioned at the very beginning of this post I sometimes get lost in there.
I know, doc, that isn’t normal, and I am working on it. But that isn’t the worst part. You see, I’m not really sure where on all those devices - online or stand alone - where any of that stuff is, or even what all is there. Sometimes when I am bored I will click over to the hard drive and browse around. [See above.] The other day I came across copies of a mini-website I had made dealing with the relationship between sculpture and quantum entanglement. OK, after I got there I remembered having done that for a class lecture, and could sort of recall why I thought it made sense. But had you asked me a priori if I had I created such a site, and where it was, my response would have been a more earthy version of “Surely you jest.”
“So,” you ask, “are you getting any better?”
“That all depends on what you mean by better,” I reply.
“I mean this need to retain everything, yet seemingly losing track of where particular pieces of ‘everything’ may be.” You clarify.
“Ah, yes. I have noticed that. And I haven’t even mentioned those writings that I wish to retain, but wish to keep totally private, but don’t know where to keep them. I mean if I could stumble across them, couldn't the CIA? The Proud Boys? So, no, not really better.” I admit.
“And what writings are those?” You ask.
“I’d really rather not go into that,” I reply.
You push a little further, “Can you give me an example of these things you write that you wish to retain, but are ambivalent about sharing?”
“Well, there is seemingly this post,” I mutter.
“What about it” you insist.
“I just sort of found it while looking for something else, and I don’t think I every posted it. There is nothing with this title on the Wall. But here it is on my screen.”
“How else could you find out if you posted it.”
“I suppose I could ask my sister. She keeps all of these posts.”
“That’s very interesting. But I see our time is up. Perhaps we can go into this further in our next session.”
“So do you want to keep our notes from today? Or should I?"
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