2003-12-20 - 3:16 p.m.
I am an obcessive maker and keeper of things. Of artwork, notebooks, journals, papers, stories, memories, anecdones, opinions. However, I am not an obcessive organizers of things, as in objects. Things as in events, yes, objects, no. I have boxes half filled with random photostickers I took with friends. Boxes of broken crayons and a bag full of drying up silkscreen ink. Cartons and cartons full of zines. However, lately I have been gripped with this fever to save everything in an organized fashion where I can easily reference it. I want to book mark what's I've made and done (and what I was thinking) and when I made it. I have just returned home (to Maine, for a week), and am already leafing through a file folder full of my past, looking at old zine flats, gripped with a fear that something might not be there.
I shake my head at myself that I have still not orgranized all the music I have made and recorded- it is rotting away on old tapes (some of them unlabled), under my bed in New York or up in a cold attic in Maine. I think about what would happen if this diary was erased-- three years of trivial writing gone, big deal. But still... I worry. maybe I am just incurably self centered and narcississtic. But maybe it is because my life is always moving, moving, that I want to leave some kind of paper trail, something solid to look back on, because I feel like I am danger of forgetting everyday.
But I also think I want to chart my personal growth, like I did on the door to the basement at my old house, my height marked off on it with a sharpie marker from the time I was 5 until I was 17 and we moved. But the door is still there and my sister lives in that house now and her kids heights are dutifully recorded on the door too. I want this kind of chart for my thinking and writing and art. For memories and people I knew. For dreams and desires. So many people and things lost then found then lost again. I think I need this record because I want to remember who I was, what I was struggling with, what I was planning and hoping for, how I was processing new information, because I want to be able to reassure myself that I can go on.
Being hopefull, creative, politically engaged, honest is a process I sometimes feel I have to reinvent everyday. Maybe I want a record to reassure me that living is always a process and growth will not stop.
(ps. if you haven't , please read the entry previous to this one)
