stuff.
Cleaning my room tonight and just wrapped up two massive bags of old banged-up CDs and obsolete floppy disks which will soon be wiped and en route to a hardware recycling plant in Los Angeles. I don’t know what’s on them anymore – old high school projects, old PC back-ups, bad music mixes, all this information that is now on the way to destruction. I get so overwhelmed with technology sometimes – in fact sometimes I fear it, the way that we rely on it to store so many facets of our lives. The way we hoard information in this physical way, things that we don’t look at for such long periods of time – things that we hope we or someone after us will revisit and find nostalgic in some odd way.
Suddenly I remember an old violinist friend telling me how a teacher of hers had told her that, during a lesson, making marks on the sheet music were not of much use; no, the things worth remembering were the things that stuck in the mind after the lesson. (I didn’t agree with that much at the time, but it perhaps says something that, in recent years, I’ve become less of a compulsive note-taker.) I think of this anecdote as I discard the old relics and make empty space on these bookshelves in my old Houston bedroom that will go mostly untouched for another several years. And I think of stuff – the way a teacher of mine sometimes says this word with a certain weight, a certain burden, to emphasize how heavy it is, how overwhelming it can be.
Maybe there is something sentimental and worth keeping in these old disks – maybe photos or childhood poems or early essays, I don’t know. I’d rather not know. All this stuff that I haven’t thought about in years… I’ve had enough of it, and somehow it seems right to say, at this point in time, that I’ve had enough of old information in general. If anything, it just makes me more aware of the need to tear down and reconstruct and preserve the remnants (most of them mental) that I have held onto all this time.
I don’t know where I am going with all this, but there is something that feels weighty and symbolic in the act of throwing all this old information away. I feel better for it. As for the fate of all the old relics – well, perhaps the things worth reviving will find the right time to revive themselves in the space of my memory.
