I’m preparing to store my stuff.
Shipping things to NZ from the UK is not cheap. I’ve tried not to accumulate many things while here, and I’m trying to be ruthless now in figuring out what I don’t need any more. But it’s hard. I like stuff that reminds me of times past.
I’ve had a strange evening, going through old stacks of paper, figuring out what I can dispose of and what I want to keep. So many surprises just from the 2.5 years I’ve been here. The biggest surprises have been the pages and pages of theory and philosophy and design and planning and manifesto and self-analysis and exploration that I wrote in my first few months in Edinburgh, before I had a job to take up my time; thousands and thousands and thousands of words. Some of it sounds scarily smart. I have a clipping from a newspaper of an article saying it’s time for Europe to get over its anti-Americanism, and tucked inside is a response in my own hand saying exactly why and where and how the article is full of shit. For four large and tightly-scrawled pages. I don’t remember writing that at all.
And letters, and postcards, and other bits and pieces. Emotions gently woken, so they turn over inside my belly before sinking back, or not quite sinking, for I still feel that strange tightness just beneath the ribs. All these people, all the things they meant and mean to me.
And plenty of wacky stuff. I liked all the wacky stuff.
I have several boxes of this sort of thing back home, too, sitting in the attic of my parent’s house. I have always been a scrawler; I’ve never kept a diary (except for one year) but I’ve documented pretty much everything important that happened inside my head on paper, somewhere, if you know where to look and how to decode the references. It’s evidence of the life I’ve lived; it’s proof of where I’ve been and where I’m going. It’s also, to be honest, assistance for the fact that I’m not nearly as good at remembering stuff as I think I should be (something that bothers me a lot).
This stuff is really important to me, and it’s coming home.
5 thoughts on “Paper Days”
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Just think of the resource it will be to future scholars of the Phenomenon That Was Morgue! 😉 The elegant hard-bound coffee-table reproductions of The Collected Works (Books 1-43)! The Annotated The Body (4th Ed)!
Okay, I’ll go have a lie-down now. 😉
If you need some stuff stored for a while, just give me a shout. I’d be happy to be Temporary Archivist of the Vaults of Morgue for a while.
And no, I wouldn’t ransack your notes for interesting philosophies of games design. me? Never!
Cheers
Malc
We should build a depository to put all this stuff in.
I reckon a building tall enough to shoot a President off would be best.
“Morgue n. repository where miscellaneous material for reference (esp drafted obituaries) is kept.” Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7th Ed.
Which is much better than a supository.