Last night I randomly found myself looking at words I wrote about 4 years ago, when times were bad but also conflicted. I don’t know how the cursor landed at that particular block of text, which is somewhere in the middle of 60,000+ words that comprise Part VI of The Road To Elvis.
It’s interesting to see myself skating through those brambles. Once in a while I can’t tell if I catch myself in a lie or if I was simply expressing a sentiment that I would later reverse. Mostly I recognized myself, even if I often have no specific memory of the exact words used to document my then-painful existence.
It is evidence. That’s what I choose to call virtually any text or documentation of these days and observations as I pass through this unique time in history. All times are unique, of course. But there can never be enough evidence.
Oh, wait. Yes there can. There can certainly be enough evidence, which is one stop from conceding there can be too much. I feel surrounded by my evidence (that sounds dirty, or else gross). The spreading shreds of paper are symptomatic of the paths I take that circle around, encroaching, passively but strenuously and inevitably strangling me.
The physical encroachment is matched on the digital stage. Digital hoarding is insidious in its way of drowning and suffocating your mind. Digital material is real, even without occupying space such that you can handle it or throw it across the room. It is as real as the music I hear when the noise of the box fan interacts with the sounds of the freezer or the heater. That music is real, and it makes something in my brain want to dance.
I feel a visceral connection I feel when downloading a large file. It’s like something is connecting to my gut, my innards. I cannot be alone in my subtle sensation of connection between a digital download and my physical core.
I was thinking about those kids who wanted to do a documentary type profile of me a few years ago. The director’s primary interest was in my descriptions and thoughts about digital hoarding. I did not give them anything to work with but they were nice people to hang out with for an afternoon or two. Digital hoarding, or as I like to euphamisticaly call it, The Art of Accumulation, characterizes my passage through our modern virtual landscape, and I am sure the same could be said for many others out there. I could do an inventory of sorts but the statistics would comprise essentially meaningless figures of which I would not be proud and in which I would not even be interested.
800,000 photos from the DSLRs? It’s possible but who cares? Quantity upon quantity and bandwidth upon bandwidth are trivial byproducts of the digital age. I felt this way in its earliest days, when the column inch became irrelevant and the vessels we filled with words went from pages and columns to infinite oceans. That was, in fact, the original thinking behind my receipts. Public documentation and sharing of random grocery receipts was nothing new when I started doing it. It had been a staple of alternative and not-so-alternative literary ‘zines and poetry rags for generations. But to say they were a “staple” should not imply that such scraps of transactional detritus were omnipresent in ‘zines or that individuals were systematically publishing their life’s collection of store receipts for public consideration. The public’s exposure to such articles was highly selective and editorially filtered. With the Internet such strictures are still present, but what if you have no use for them? My statement with the receipts was that quantity had become irrelevant. (really need to refine this, I’ve articulated this better in the past, I think…)
How to navigate my “Projects” directory? That is where I put stray ideas and stillborn concepts for later revival or, more likely, eventual oblivion. The Projects section has over 100,000 files, a bloated quantity which I don’t actually understand how I arrived at but which I don’t feel a need to analyze. I wade through that stuff now feeling like parts of it are unexplored wilderness, since I have no memory of scanning certain magazines or writing countless paragraphs. An inevitable effect of this is that I do some things twice, or three times. I can accept that in scanning those hundreds upon hundreds of pages from the old music magazines that I probably scanned some issues twice. I cannot let myself lament the redundant labor since it represents such a relatively insignificant amount of time in the bigger picture.
Looking through scans I forgot I did, and which I could well have done over if i did not just happen to notice them now. These are scans of Perspectives magazine, the blandly-named trade journal of the payphone industry published by the American Public Communications Council. The APCC ceased print publication of Perspectives but continued with a PDF-only version for a few years before unceremoniously putting the title out of its misery. Last I heard the APCC was still hanging in there, though they unplugged their website and will most likely stop processing dialaround compensation payments for what’s left of the nation’s roughly 175-200 independent payphone service providers. I actually offered to host the APCC’s website for free but they declined. I think those folks are finally getting ready to move on, having stuck it out to the bitter end.
I am going out walking, now that the rain has cleared. I need to organize my mind, and not just write into a rectangular space like this. I had a piece of software intended to help do just that but I never figured it out.
