I've always been a packrat, hoarding bits of paper and detritus, mostly because I have this ongoing notion that I might need to reference something in the future. Yesterday, I spend some time in the garage fighting this tendency by sorting, and then parting with, some of my long hoarded stash of old receipts, college correspondence (do I really still need reminders to attend meetings that happened nearly 20 years ago?), and other oddball items. I even found my graduation program from junior high! whoop-de-do. It felt liberating to dump the majority of my findings into the recycle bin. I was a bit annoyed at how San Jose State uses social security numbers as student I.D. numbers, which meant that I had to shred lots of paper before consigning it to the bin.

I also found the novel version of "The Last Unicorn," the movie version of which has entranced Willow for around half a year now. I might try reading it to her, even though it is aimed at a much older audience. I also found more cassettes I want to convert to digital files. It's nice to be able to put on music that's been sitting in the garage for years, and experience it like no time has passed since I last heard it. I guess that's the nature of nostalgia. I guess my memory of the music from my youth is so vivid because I didn't have such an overwhelming amount of music back then. Songs had a chance to settle and resonate inside me. It's nice to find that they're still there, resonating away.

In amongst the papers I found an unused fragment of an autobiographical piece, no doubt from the time when the OAC was turning out autobiographical vignettes. It took me back to an old routine, one that I'm sure would have faded beyond memory otherwise. Not that I suppose I really need to remember delivering newspapers. Here it is anyway:

As usual, Jerome and Julian are there before me. Jerome is playing minesweeper on one of the office's two computers, and Julian is complaining, a prelude to his other pet subjects: prostitutes, TV, and farts.
Patricio arrives next, not because he has to be there that early, but because he drives down from Modesto every night and is never quite sure how long it's going to take him to commute.
Not long after, the first papers arrive, in neat bundles of fifty. Jerome and I are supposed to break open the bundles and sort them by route so they can be delivered. Tonight however, they are without route numbers, making the job next to impossible.
Kim, who is supposedly in charge, shows up with his usual look of resignation and tells us to do our best. I make my usual negative comments about the company responsible for printing and bundling the papers, followed by several impractical but satisfying solutions to their organizational problems. Kim counters with suggestions about what he could do with my paycheck. I get to work.
These papers, with all the problems they bring, aren't even the ones I've signed on to deliver. They're just these tiny little pieces of colorful financial toilet paper that I suspect very few people actually read. I have made this determination after months of littering sidewalks with them, watching them pile up into little drifts. Now I just throw a large portion of my papers into the recycling pile.

I'm not sure where I was going with that. I abandoned it mid-stream for some reason or other. Scattered throughout my belongings are many such unfinished writings, some of them mere grains of ideas, and some of them even (bad) poetry. I keep them though, because sometimes I go back and discover that I actually like something I'd previously not been bothered to finish. Of course, sometimes the opposite is true.

Sometimes I produce garbage.