Hey,I just had a built-in editor!

I was getting bogged down in an idea I was trying to work my way out of when Safari suddenly quit on me and left me with nothing but the title of this post . So I can start again, more cleanly. I still want to make my point, that we are so bombarded with too much raw, undigested information that we don't have or take the time to process and assimilate. I am revising my NY resolutions and making them negative.

Uppermost is this one: Do NOT BUY so much.

Food and books, for starters. I have a fridge and freezer bull of food and bookshelves full of books, a lot of it waiting to be consumed. So start consuming. Well, I do, have, am - consuming all the time and I complain that i don't have enough time. But if I didn't have so much stuff, so much backlog, then I would gradually have more time, wouldn't I? I might also have some thoughts about what i've been taking in so thoughtlessly.

I wasn't always like this. Either i was swifter (probably) or I was doing less in the way of back-up. I think that's true, too, because I had less stuff to back up. It takes a long time to accumulate all the stuff I have and it takes more and more time to sort it all out. Half a century ago, literally, I thought my life would be complete, and organized, if I could just file some of the stuff I was collecting. I couldn't afford a filing cabinet but I found a Carnation Milk cardboard carton exactly the right size to hold file folders. Wow. I have genuine steel filing cabinets now but I'm still scrounging cardboard boxes to hold more files. I'm spending the weekend on files, trying to organize all my clippings and stray thoughts and random ideas. I know I know I know what you're going to tell me. Put it in the computer. I've tried DOO and EVERNOTE and I think there's one called SKITCH (?) but my mind is too linear, I guess, and besides, I love to handle and mark up paper. Hey, where would the paperclip industry be without paper? I'm supporting an endangered species. I don't mind if staples disappear because they're hell on fingernails to remove. But paperclips moor and tether and gather and corral oh, and tidy my bits and pieces.

How did I get on to paperclips when all I want to say is how important it is to stop the accumulation before it's too late?

I've said it before and others with me, that September is like a new year in terms of the resolutions and plans one makes for the coming season. Yes, people make resolutions and plans for the calendar new year but it's different. It's more like girding one's loins and gritting one's teeth for a renewed attack, not a fresh project. New lists help, though they're much like the old lists, Cross off a few items, add some new, underline and star the nagging ones that are still unfinished - or never started? What do you do for a kickstart on a tired list?

Well,what a start! I had to recharge the battery, came back and wrote a conclusion to discover that i wasn't logged on so I lost it. I'm home now and I'll try to recap what I said. I think I was explaining why I was pretty tolerant of weak resolutions because 45 years ago I succeeded at a major resolve - to quit smoking. It was hard but I never started again. That resolution was a promise, one of the synonyms of resolution. (I looked it up.)

Resolution: intention, resolve, decision, intent. aim, commitment, pledge, promise. Well, a promise to myself but maybe a pledge to my children. (It worked: none of them smokes.)

So that's what we do at this time of year. We go on, we go on. (I've said that before.)