remembrance or disposal?

To toss or not to toss.

I am still finding more goodies in my files, clippings and notes and ideas and commonplaces that get shredded by my faithful shredder, Matthew, or bits and pieces that deserve a nod and a nibble. When is a blog not a blog? When it’s half-baked.

The decisions are killing me—no, they’re not. They are taxing me (that, too), but most, worst of all, they are draining me. I think I have commented before that I am capable of only so many decisions a day, beginning with the major ones like when or if to get out of bed, what to do first, what to cook/eat for breakfast lunch and dinner and in-between, and when to quit, that is, knock off for the day and try again tomorrow. Life is so daily. I’ve said that before.

I am still dealing with Remembrance and Disposal.

It’s the title of a Facts & Arguments essay that appeared in a Globe and Mail essay some time in July, 2003 and that I picked up again this week. I looked up the author, Antonia Morton—“Your Plain Language Specialist". She is a professional. She is articulate, she writes and edits and teaches others; she is practical and funny. Like me. No wonder I kept the article.

A packrat (like me), she realized, sort of like me, that no one is ever going to research my files and write a book, or even a footnote, about them. She has all these folders under various categories— theatre reviews, kids’ letters, income tax receipts receipts, work. That’s the killer. I keep finding synopses of plays and books and movies and sometimes first drafts, as well as ideas and outlines and pitches and queries of work that I will never write unless I live another hundred years.

Morton concludes her essay by reporting that she has reduced her past to an all-purpose Memorabilia folder, keeping one piece of paper each from all her past files, trimmed neatly, with a blank side for notes. Like me.

It doesn’t work, though.I If it weren’t for Matthew and the shredder, I’d have a bonfire of inanities: phone numbers, appointments, passwords, both obsolete and new. recipes, and words. “Words, words, words”, to quote Shakespeare. I have to keep those until I look them up.

You’ll know when.