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December 13, 2005

"Spring" cleaning

After two weeks of getting nothing done due to illness, I got my energy back in a major way and I’ve been on a cleaning and throwing-away binge for days.

It started with the t-shirts in my bedroom closet. They’re on shelves, and the shelves were just a jumble of knotted, crumpled fabric. So I pulled every damn shirt down and tossed out more than a hundred of them. I also reduced by stash of sweatshirts from a dozen to four, deleted a few shirt-type shirts, threw away a pair of jeans w/ a loose button that I’ll never get replaced, and tossed several pairs of shorts and some worn-out socks.

Then I went into my office, aka entropy city. I’ve been at it for days in there. I have been accumulating sheets of cardboard and corrugated paper for decades, just in case I needed to mail something. I’ve got letterhead from jobs I left 25 years ago and magazines I wrote for 20 years ago; magazines with Something About Me in ‘em that I needed multiple copies of (why? elephino!); computer cables for interfaces that have been obsolete for a decade; nonfunctional digital tape recorders; documentation for software I replaced years ago; software I haven’t used since I had a black and white monitor; a basket full of rubebr stamps that my dear deceased business manager loved to use but which i haven’t touched since she went on sick leave and never came back.

I’ve had books stuffed into shelves all over the place, in among the cassettes and VHS tapes, with no rhyme or reason; CD racks that hold two dozen disc, whose contents would all be more appropriately stored with the larger collections; little wire baskets full of nothing in particular; a couple hundred Priority mail labels with my return address printed on them, which I haven’t used in years; a stash of labels for the postage meter I returned two years ago; a big cardboard rack with 32 compartments - designed to hold stacks of letter-size paper - more than half of which were filled with nothing in particular.

For twenty years now I have been printing extra copies of the cue sheets for my radio show and storing them in one or more of those compartments. Once or twice a year I’d take a hundred or so of the oldest sheets and move them over into the compartment that held printed-on-one-side paper that I can use for printing nonessential documents (e.g. WELL topics to read in the bathtub). I’ve got reels of tape that belong to other people, the contents of which I’ve already digitized and burned to CD for them, but for some reason I haven’t returned the reels.

I found an ancient box containing the floppy discs and documentation for Microsoft Excel, which I haven’t used on any of my computers in probably five years.

You get the picture?

I have already filled up the trash can and the recycling bin, and we took half a cubic yard of t-shirts, sweaters, etc. to various charitable outlets on Sunday.

I now have a thousand sheets of printed-on-one-side paper ready to reuse. I will from now on only print enough cue sheets to meet my needs; it occurs to me that this computer I have in my lap has the entire 20-year run of the show for on-demand printing should the need arise.

I have collected all the books from all four corners of the office and stacked them on top of the filing cabinets, where the behemoth paper- compartment thingie dominated the room for a decade. I will organize the books by various appropriate criteria and take about a third of them over to KPFA when I go in to do my show; I will leave them in the lobby, and most of them will be gone by the time I leave the building two hours later. I will put some of the bound galleys of Grateful Dead-related books up for sale on eBay and give some of the proceeds to Rock the Earth and to a friend of mine who lost her job and her health insurance just as she began being treated for cancer.

I’m in the process of retrievinng all the posters and photos from their dusty sanctuaries behind bookcases, in closets, and over there by the printer. I may try to sell some of the David Lance Goines posters I bought in the ’80s. I may try to sell some of the Herb Greene and Jim Marshall photos I have accumulated over the years. I’ve put up a few collectibles on eBay, and there will be many more in the weeks to come.

There’s more.

I haven’t said a word about the CDs, which are far and away the biggest problem.

Posted by gans at December 13, 2005 10:35 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Eric at December 14, 2005 9:24 AM

Posted by: Paul Dirks at December 14, 2005 9:38 AM

Posted by: Phil Reed at December 14, 2005 3:03 PM