Digital hoarding. The documentary team that came calling a couple of years ago, or its director at least, wanted to focus on that aspect of my online existence. It’s not out of a sense of missed opportunity that I find myself reflecting on that possibility. It’s just that I think the director was after something more interesting than I might have thought at the time. I remember trying to draw their attention to various individual projects of mine, thinking that all of them assembled in a place might reflect the intellectual congestion of a digital hoarder. In that spirit we spent most of our afternoon together at the cemetery, from whence I have accumulated countless photos and made numerous transcriptions of etchings on the tombstones there. All of it can be classified as hoarding since its value is, at best, infinitesimal. But I thought there might be more use for all that when I decided to spend my time amassing it.
I think of all information, if it exists, as being together and relevant, always obtainable even when it languishes in a storage room or in the corner of a massive cemetery. I want all things, all objects and experiences (including sound) to be retrievable from the unknown medium in which I believe it to be stored. I believe that every object and creature you’ve ever encountered and anything that happened anywhere is continuing every second of its moment-to-moment progress in a physical and definable realm that we humans simply have not figured out how to access. It creates a panic in me to think about it too long, that a horrible experience I want never to remember might barge in on me and happen all over again in its entirety. But then I long for some objects and tendernesses to repeat themselves. Who doesn’t?
Just now I saw myself in the reflection of the computer monitor. I had stopped writing for a moment to express anger and dismay at a piece of software that just does not want to work. I stomp my right foot. I whine. My brow furrows and my voice sounds like that of a child who was just told he would not be allowed to go out with his friends, or that he will not be getting any dessert. Somewhere that moment exists, simmering in its triviality with no less relevance than what might have happened in an apartment upstairs, or at a house in Woodside. At the house of one Segundo Costanza, on 47th Street in Woodside, just occurred something that was documented equally even if the incident carried greater significance. I don’t know Segundo. I found his name on a scrap of paper that formerly littered Northern boulevard, but which now litters my desk. I have walked past his house in Woodside, though its image on Streetview summons no memory of it. His name and street appear to have been written as a return address on an American Express envelope, which was torn to pieces and, I guess never sent. It seems unlikely he would have torn up a payment to Amex. I think he must have written to complain about something but then decided not to go through with it. What could have been important enough for him to have written the letter but not important enough to justify the time spent doing so by actually connecting it to the target of his ire? Perhaps he intended to dispute a charge but then realized it was legitimate. Or he might have disagreed with a penalty only to give up in anticipated frustration of doing combat with a lawyered-up corporate behemoth.
The exact circumstances and events which transpired to connect Segundo and I through me finding his name and exact location is not know to me. But I know it can be accessed. I just don’t know how but the act of him writing the letter, addressing the envelope, thinking about sending it, then giving up and tearing the whole thing to shreds… that decision-making process is out there. All of it is out there. The universe is a vast hoarding medium of accumulated experiences and objects.
Yeah, I know, it’s a desultory ramble. Maybe I need to do more of that. But I do think there’s something in here, the mental furniture of our lives and the way we retain selective memories and feel violated by the unselected ones that barge in on us, like the memory of the school bus beating came stomping in yesterday. I did not want to think about that but I did not want to wave it away to oblivion, either.
I was thinking of what that documentary might have amounted to, but again not with any seed of regret or desire to have actually done it. It’s in a similar spirit as an idea I had last week, when journeying up to the Sandwich King on 23rd Avenue. I though, wouldn’t it be something if a documentary film maker found my knowledge of an interest in the Astoria sandwich scene to be notable enough to spend hours and hours following me around, recording my decision-making processes with each and every sandwich starting with the choice of delicatessen at which to attempt the purchase down to my store-by-store comparison of why a certain sandwich or a sandwich maker is better one day versus another. My granular complaints about the leathery texture and firmness of one deli’s cotto salami versus another’s soft-as-butter Genoa meats would fascinate audiences at The Film Forum, leading to formal studies of sandwiches and those of us who pursue them with such earnest commitment.
The documentary would conclude that a man is a reflection of the sandwiches he eats, and my life would thus be described as monotonous and repetitive, a diurnal routine of meats and cheeses that metaphorically paint the picture of a lonely, bored, uninspired individual who declines to take advantage of what life’s rich harvest has to offer. The director would lament the opportunities I had every single day to venture into the world of garlic bologna or lightly peppered liverwurst. How, he would ask, do I think I think it benefits myself to exclude chipotle hummus and skinless pork frankfurters from the opportunity of helping keep me alive?
Or they might think I’m some kind of genius for keeping it simple. No way to know since this film will never be made or even remotely considered. A sandwich maker, sure, that could be a worthy subject for this kind of analysis. But the sandwich destroyer would have to be documented as some kind of joke.
Going for a sammich right now.
