Some boxes I got from storage last year have been moldering away, but I finally got the energy and the ruthlessness needed to just dump a bunch of it. Sometimes I save a scrap of paper here, a memento there, but it’s been more drastic than usual. I shredded one thing I might have wanted to save. It was the note I wrote to Tyra Banks when she did an online chat at Sports Illustrated in, I guess it was 1995 or 1996. I guess iot would have been more save-worthy if she had written a note. All my note contained was a login and password I created for her, though I cant’ recall now if she would have actually used any such credential. My memory of this could be totally off but I seem to remember doing all the typing of her comments and replies to the questions, which came from an audience that appeared to be 100% male and which I had to filter for all the dumbasseries like “Do you like knowing men all over the world masturbate to pictures of you?”

After the chat I heard from one of her handlers that she told an interviewer at Entertainment Tonight something like “The webmaster was really cute”, referring to me. Hah. I do not disbelieve the dude who told me that but I don’t think her comments were played on the air. In those days celebrities doing online chats like that were newsworthy. I also remember her wrists having about the same girth as my little finger.

This round of purging has an air of melancholy about it, but then all things can make me feel that way. I finally got rid of a big box of bad news, namely the stack of newspapers and magazines I collected after 9/11. I saved one copy of each New York newspaper but everything else is gone, or soon will be. Obviously I can get to that day’s lead story online, which is one of the most real and spine-tingling piece I can remember, but there is something almost sensuous about having the paper copy. That issue sells on eBay for fifty or sixty bucks tops, but those prices seem to be hit or miss. But even if there was real money to be made I don’t know if I could follow through with the ghoulish-seeming move of cashing in on that event. I’d feel better selling  something like a Johnny Carson memorial magazine (I found such a thing in my coffers) but of course those things almost never have any value.

It is not lost on me that I am going about this the way one is not supposed to. I’m going item by item, piece by piece, when in the end all that would happen to my stuff it it would end up in a dumpster, all of it. What do I think I am salvaging here? I look through receipts and hand-written notes from the 1990s and feel like I do not recognize the person who bought those things or wrote those words. I don’t know that person any better than I know this person today. I find letters from my mother and father, raising a few ghosts from my memory that had slipped away. For some reason I was sending my mother money after I moved here. It must have had something to do with student loans or possibly The Case, but the latter sounds impossible since there was never even an implicit suggestion that I owed her anything for the expenses associated that. She was involved in the voicemail stuff, not as much as the rest of us but she and I left a lot of messages for each other through on VMB or another. This fact never came up in the proceedings or in my interviews the District Attorney or anyone else, a fact which I felt deep down could have somehow turned The Case upside down. My reasons for thinking that back then are kind of lost on me now, but since she never accessed the voicemail system in question maybe it would ultimately have been irrelevant. Still, the idea of my mother being interrogated and fined over that stuff was enough to make me seasick at the time, and it was just one of many potential outcomes that made the entire ordeal so stressful.

One very intriguing find is a money order I wrote to the greeting card company whose voicemail system we phreaked. I have been collecting evidence like that and had wanted to add that to my “exhibit” should I ever tell the whole story publicly.

I also find letters from past girlfriends or from women who were interested enough in me to maintain correspondences for years. One letter surprises me now, from the college roommate who was at home when the FBI dude came around asking for me. Our relationship was completely platonic but when that happened she sounded as if she herself should be concerned about who she was living with. I don’t remember what I said but I managed to diffuse the situation, probably with the assurance that I was being questioned about non-violent things where no one was hurt. But I don’t remember how much I told her. She sent me a letter five years after college, but I don’t think I ever responded.

Letters from dad are interesting to me now. I forgot he got a subscription to Apology magazine, which I co-created with Allan Bridge, DBA Mr. Apology. Dad’s comments were funny. He said (paraphrasing) that some parts were more repulsive than others but that all in all it was a double ugh. He was happy to subscribe, though, just to help out our little endeavor. Apparently there was a story about the Apology Project in an Orlando paper which dad happened to see, and he sent it to me, but that piece of paper is no longer here.

I stopped taking any pictures of discarded items. I might have busted the flash bulb on that little camera. It was making a clicking or popping noise at first, then it started flashing with extreme brightness. I should have just turned it off but after a few shots it sounded like the thing might burst into flame.

This episode of purging has a feeling of finality about it. I can’t put a finger on why but it’s like I am the impartial individual who would be assigned the task of going through my stuff after I die. I want to be remembered for everything I am, but the task of understanding who I have been and who I will be in the future feels incalculably overwhelming. I’m going to think on that now as I go out for the first long walk in a few days. It’s been raining Florida-style here the last few days, with violent thunderstorms and lightning, just like I grew up with in Tampa but never really got used to.

I was up earlier than usual today. More time to waste, right?