I have cleaned my office closet, which has been an archeological dig, sort of.
One of the blockers to cleaning my closet was taking care of a bin of old notepads. For almost 40 years, I’ve carried pocket notepads and my leather binder (the one on the cover of Coffee House Memories, which I still carry to coffee shops and other events where I might want to take notes). And I’ve always saved the notepads in case scholars wanted to dig through my archives to study how my poems evolved. Because, in my 20s, I considered the possibility that I might be a major figure in American letters, and even though I was already then raging against political correctness, I cognitatively dissidented the two possibilities might be true. Not that political correctness has kept me from ascending the heights of literature; being lazy and a jackwagon did most of that.
But: I kept them anyway in case I wanted to go over them myself someday. But the time came to clean the closet–after all, it’s been on my to-do list app for months, and I’ve had a box of school supplies from the closet for the whole summer, it seems. I hope to donate to the Lutheran school here, but I’m afraid they will say no, and I will have to discard a pile of construction paper, unused two-pocket folders, cardstock, and etc. Or worse yet, I’ll put it back in my closet to languish until my heirs have to deal with it.
And….
I started with one of the beta copies of John Donnelly’s Gold. Back when I finished the novel, about twenty years ago and ten years before I self-published it, I printed up some spiral-bound copies and asked some peers to review it. The top one was Hans, the former blue-haired tech leader from St. Louis. He had some notes on the last page. I had a copy my mother-in-law went through, and she wrote long notes on large adhestive-topped notepads. Another copy had some really pretty cursive handwriting on it–I’m not sure who that might have been–my beautiful wife does not write in cursive.
I’d kept them because then, even in my early thirties, I believed it would catch fire and the beta editions would be collectibles. But like so many other things, they were just collectingdustibles. If you’re keeping track at home, each 200+ page volume was enough to fill the shredder’s bin.
So what else did I discover?
Well, the yellow pad atop the stack was very old indeed. The first page had a note written by the girl who I dated for a couple of years after college–she was trying to cheer me up and pointed out that she loved me and that some of my Milwaukee friends loved me and my dog (actually, my mother’s dog) loved me–and I followed with a note that the dog was very friendly.
Apparently, this writing notes to others in my coffee house folder was a thing; another pad yielded a note to my wife’s previous boyfriend that she and I wrote notes to each other on the paper table coverings at Brandt’s, a place where she came to read on Sunday evenings when she lived in Columbia. She had me meet him for some reason at a coffee shop in Columbia. She was going to remain friends with him, but did not.
I found notes for The Naughty Dog Show on Radisson notepad paper:
I mentioned when I got Bandit’s Naughty Dog Adventure on the Microsoft Store in August (also on the Apple Store now):
But the inspiration for this game came from a casino commercial that came on in our hockey-watching days: A little terrier mix is walking down the street, getting into trouble, and when the dog catcher throws him into the back of the animal control van, there are two poodles there, and the message is that the dog, like casino attendees, would be lucky?
At any rate, at some point, I started jotting down a treatment for a television series based on the concept of a naughty dog called The Naughty Dog Show. I didn’t get beyond a couple pages of notes on it, but here, decades later, is a little LLM-developed game.
Well, there were original notes.
For some reason, I listed poems that I had memorized in the middle 1990s:
I threw many of them into my open mic sets, and I recited “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to the woman who would become my mother-in-law the first time I met her at a steak house in Rolla. In like Flynn. Of all of them, I know I can do “Love, though for this you riddle me with darts”, and I could probably do the rest of them except Prufrock with just a freshening.
I also came across practice runs of the poems, where I wrote them out to make sure I remembered them. Most of the actual memorization work occurred at the printing plant while I stood idle watching the prescription blanks go by.
The larger pads and the folder I took to coffee shops; I had a smaller refillable memo pad folder that I carried in my pocket, and I’d saved a number of these pads for scholars as well. Wow, I could write small; I must have favored fine-tipped pens at the time. And I probably never thought I might almost need cheaters or a magnifying glass to read them the next time I looked at them.
So: Ultimately, mostly drafts and repeated drafts of poems I’d written and which, presumably, have on the computer or the backups somewhere. Notes for the fantasy novel Beyond the Range and actual longhand prose for Down at Joe Jack’s, both of which I noted in a 2020 post The Folder of Broken Dreams and haven’t touched since (see also lazy and a jackwagon.
I saved a handful of pages to make sure I have the draft poems captured on the computer, but the rest is already in the Big Green Bin at the recycling center getting ready for its next life as cat litter.
And the closet is clean now; I have shelved, finally, most of the remaining books I got when my mother-in-law downsized, and I have organized my unlistened-to audio courses on the shelf so I can easily choose what to listen to next (after having completed Great Scientific Ideas that Changed The World recently.
And not to go all Marie Kondo, but I also discarded a couple of things of note. But that’s a story for another day.
