Tonight I’m placing ten years worth of clips, press hits, photos, diaries, manuscripts, cribs from my lectures, notes from other people’s lectures, letters, and really sketchy wireframe illustrations in archival boxes. (I mean, really sketchy, and really too many of them. If I actually created all of the websites I’ve mocked up…)
I am also watching the original Grey Gardens, or, as Julie Klausner put it, “Hoarders 1.0,” so.
I collect. I keep. I regularly go back and take stock. In a moment of kindness, a friend compared this behavior of mine to the assumptions one could make about the German people’s fondness for nostalgia as evidenced in the design of their toilets. A less forgiving take on my need to hold onto the past is that I am collecting intelligence on everyone who matters to me, including myself.
My answer is that I’m not good at living and writing at the same time, but I do take very fast and accurate shorthand.
This is why I still have to keep a diary. The press clips and lecture notes and even the wireframes — that all I keep out of vanity. The diary is practical, and has nothing to do with exposure. I’ll read it to anyone who asks. There are no secrets.
I don’t hold onto it all in order to reveal anything. I do it to remember that the truth changes and to become a more accurate observer of when I got it wrong in the stories I’ve told myself over time.
Now I go back and read: where I thought I had it all down right, where I didn’t, where I have to accept that I can never capture it any better and so hope those were days that don’t mean anything because now, aside from what’s missing, they can’t.
(I wrote another post this week called “New Zeroes,” but that’s on tumblr. Which, ever the mind towards the archival, I’m wondering if I should just fold in here. Or this there. Do you have an opinion, or is this just what passes for ‘content strategy’ or ’spiritual crisis’ these days?)
