The Future is a Present to be Past

I am hostage to history.

This is not an A&E special. This is my basement.

The things I have. I still have. I bought new shelves this week from Costco just to store these things. Again. I move them. I look inside, thinking of things past. I don’t know why I hold them.

Some sentimental. Some just garbage I was told to keep.

I have a row of large, bulky, beautifully decorated glossy boxes from Microsoft and Adobe. They once contained a slim silvery disk with more data on them than my entire home could house. But still, they come with large books – many hundreds of pages – weighing pounds. Boxes with books and air and an enormous amount of data on a thing the size of a whisper. Keep the whisper.

Do you want an Operator Manual for Windows 95? I have two. How about for Photoshop 6.5? I’m using 7.0 anyway. (I put these all in the recycling now.)

Here are grade reports from my Freshman year in college. The FBI, I suspect, has these too. Why do I keep them? Perhaps this paper seems too…real…to throw away. It’s not a memory. It was issued by a secretary who actually typed the ink onto the paper. Now retired. Or dead. Her children had to throw her crap away.

I know I made a deposit at First National in Boulder at 12:38 p.m. on October 12^th, 1983. That’s a memory I’ll cherish.

This is a somewhat creased photograph of a person who used to be a friend. He’s having fun in this picture, smiling with me. He pathologically pursued sex with each of my ex-girlfriends in college. Sometimes he succeeded. Eventually he dropped out…and years later married the woman who was married to his "best friend" who had died. He must have been part dog, this former friend of mine. Why do I have this photo? (I tear it in half and throw it away.)

Clothes? Size what? Was I ever that size? (Boxes now going to Goodwill.)

Radios. Printers. Many electronics. That CD player that started doing that thing. That thing that was not right, and I thought, “I’ll try to fix that.” And it’s six years now. It needs to go away.

There would be so much more air in my house with these things gone.

I need more air.