Friday, September 05, 2003

Pastiche

A sense of letting go
unowing
resurfacing my past in all its
surplussage and wastefulness
box after dusty cardboard box
This one’s got ten years of banking
going back so far it’s like
a fiscal Olduvai, recording
lives once lived and since, repressed:
crises, parties, poverties,
so many choices every day
each minute full as they are now
reality was likewise dense
and I was fretful, poor of spirit,
callow, prideful, heedless, weak -
this box is all our household records
three year’s worth and twelve years old
I smell the tension in the paper
filed compulsively, forgotten,
blinking in the light of day
I read my failings in my checkbook
trace my lifeline through my archives
handle every sheet and staple
drop them though the narrow slot
and hear the engine whir as tinsel
fills the bin beneath the rotors
the sound of history erasing
triumphs, tragedies alike
and with each bag of shredded paper
each old box that I dispose of
I regain that share of spirit
feel my archived energy
returning to me, rather musty,
needing some reintegration
nonetheless a prodigal
homecoming of recycled mojo

Having hauled the bags of shred
downstairs to bins two flights below
I run back up at doublespeed
and take the steps two at a time
triumphant in rejuvenation

"a prodigal homecoming of recycled mojo.” i like it. it’s funny how the past, whatever its form, can weigh us down.

Again, you’ve done it. Excuse me, I have some cleaning to do.

deep yo. deeeeeeep.

Fantastic.  Surplussage is my new favorite word.

I know what you mean--I love dumping old telephone bills into the shredder!  Bank statements, Visa bills, and everything else.  It makes me feel good.

technically, in france, you’re supposed to hang on to paperwork for 5 years.  gas bills, electric bills, telephone bills, certainly your immigration stuff, payslips, credit card statements ... this is why i live in a filing system more labyrinthine than the library of Unseen University in terry pratchett novels.  but that makes it sound organized and professional.  in fact it’s more like forging an apartment living space in between the piles of crap.

Yes this is why I was so jazzed to get my shredder, dork that I am.  I am keeping everything from 1998 forward, for this year at least, and all the tax stuff.  But I am now released from 1986 through 1997.  It’s a whole new world now - in that it’s not the same old world.  I feel free to live in the present.  I’m glad I’m not the only one to get such satisfaction from this stuff!

congratulations on your liberation from paperasse.  which doesn’t mean paper ass, as one might justifiably think, but paper crap.  a very different matter.

That’s a very cool word, Romy.  Thanks for adding it to the Chucklehut lexicon!

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