Notes on Notes, volume 2.

Occasionally I try to get a handle on the entropy of my life. This mostly involves moving masses of paper from desktops to boxes/recycling. (Recently I became the owner of a filing cabinet, which will be the future prison for many currently floating items in my room.) Many of the papers are scraps on which I have scribbled random notes for later use. Often I will go through these notes and have no idea to what they refer. This also happens in my digital life (as documented in a blog post from last year, "Spring Cleaning"). However, I do know the meaning of the following computer note, unearthed a few minutes ago:

empty picture frames (a dozen or so), and four full ones on the mantle
out-of-tune piano
gold and silver chess set
game room

gopher shooting

It refers to a woman I met once in Montana while on tour with The Scott Fisher Band. This young woman was recently divorced from a venture capitalist, one of whose investments was in a fledgling startup called "Google"; consequently she, though barely thirty and unemployed, was wealthy beyond yours or my dreams. One evening she decided to head into town from her vacation home and catch some live music, proceeding to ensnare the lead singer and bring the entire band back with her that night. We appreciated her largesse, had a right fun time in the game room and the private movie theatre, and each slept in his own private bedroom that night. The next afternoon we were treated to jetskiing and other water sports at her other lakeside residence. I enjoyed myself as much as the next fellow (the jetskiing was especially thrilling), but boy was part of me sickened by the display. (The "gopher shooting" refers to a favorite childhood pastime of hers, described in gruesome detail.)

"Oh gosh!" you say, "How noble you are to denounce a rich, vapid woman!" Thank you, I say, but this post isn't really about that. I just got sidetracked. No, this post, as evidenced by the title, is about notes. As I implied earlier, my computer desktop gets as cluttered as my actual desktop. I do my best to stay organized by placing things in appropriately titled folders, e.g. "pictures" or "pics" or "recent pictures". But eventually there are too many categories, and my desktop overfloweth. When this happens, I have no recourse but to toss everything in a folder called "old desktop" and start anew. I'm sure you are all familiar with this sad story.

I have resolved to do one mega-cleaning/organizing. One part of that will be finding all the folders of pictures (there are 33 of them, according to a quick computer search) and combining them, deleting doubles, and organizing the remaining mass in an intelligent way. Yet as I comb through "desktop", "old desktop", "old desktop #2", and "desktop" (there are three of them, in fact), I find myself reminiscing and hesitating to destroy even the old organizational systems that contain my nostalgia. I have such an attachment to things from my past, and notes about those things, and folders that contained those notes. When I come across them, I get a brief flash of memory, a wistful or rueful smile, and they're soon forgotten again. What is the point?

* I am often convinced that one of the greater tragedies of my life was the accidental and permanent deletion of all of my emails pre-2005. What were they but** documents of my past?

** "But"?!