I have seen the show Hoarders once or twice. Quite frankly, I’ve always had a hard time understanding these people. I mean, who is sick enough to store all that stuff, stuff they will probably never even use, let alone remember that they have.
Well, it turns out I am a hoarder, too. Not in the traditional sense, mind you. My many misadventures in amour have solved that issue, me leaving behind potential hoard caches in various locales over the years, often at a moment’s notice.
It’s amazing how little stuff you really need to keep in your life. In my exit from Renton, I took two Pinto wagon loads away from the house. That was it. In between this departure and my escape to Florida, I had moved up to a pick up truck at times (thanks Bobby) and later, a moving van or two. With Florida, I was down to a single load taking up the back of my Windstar. That, and eight boxes shipped UPS, moved me and my company to the Sunshine State.
That’s not the entire truth I have come to find. While I keep the physical hoard managable, my digital hoard is massive. I have emails going all the way back to 1997 on my computer and projects I did in corporate going back to the dawn of the personal computer age, files created in PageMaker 3.0 and Freehand 1.0. I would probably have even more if it weren’t for two complete computer failures along the way where nearly everything was lost.
Like a possession hoarder, I hoard the damnedest things. I have a recipe for Rhubarb Custard Pie from 2000 from my friend Cassie (delicious, by the way), sandwiched between a WordPerfect letter from an old love and a registration confirmation from masterfile.com, whatever that is. I seem to have a lot of registration emails from places like Classmates, Friendster, MySpace and HistoricShipwrecks. You just never know when you’re going to need one of these, even if some of them have since ceased operations.
I have every application to The Pyrates of the Coast ever submitted, some 155. Wow, if everyone had panned out I’d have the biggest crewe on the planet. Honors of the first application goes to Chuck Janicki of Gig Harbor in 2002. My friend Pierre applied on Dec. 17, 2003; Black Skot, Sept. 3, 2004. Krimson Kat (back then going by the moniker Red Handed Jill), applied Jan. 1, 2005. I didn’t know you sang, Kat. 🙂
All this is pretty pedestrian when compared to the digital hoarding I have done in my relationships. Yes, I have a huge digital “paper” trail of most of my courtships. I really have no idea why. For instance, I have the emails from when Diablo was trying to lure me to Florida, sending me daily reasons why I should live there in January of 2004, such as “Reason #9: Citrus grows on trees… in the backyard.” I told you she wasn’t very witty. I suppose red lights should have been going off in my head when she wrote in an earlier email, “I was getting mopey because of the whole ‘turning 30 and being single still’ thing. I am a pisces (sic), we are prone to be emotional wrecks if we sit home and think about it.” Waa!
I have whole strings of email sequences from when I was on Match.com. I didn’t really want to waste my time dating someone who couldn’t string two sentences together so a few rounds of digital repartee were essential to see if we would have something to talk about when we came face to face. Unfortunately, many of my pen pals proved to be good writers but not good conversationalists, so what seemed like a promising relationship in print, fell apart in person.
I’m sure some of my significant and/or insignificant others would be shocked to hear that I have complete records of our chats back and forth. I could even ruin a marriage or two if I were patently evil, which I’m not.
But I’m not going to share all those details here. As I said, I’m really not even sure why I keep them. Like all hoarding, it starts out innocently enough. I get something from someone else in an email or via a link and drop it into a folder for future reference. Time passes, and I forget it’s still in a folder on my computer somewhere. One day, I’ll innocently do a text search and up pops something I had entirely forgotten about.
Such is the case with a communique in 2002. My ex and I were discussing our business and its direction. We had decided that we were going to become storytellers, even retagging the CommuniCreations’ slogan as, “Everyone has a story… what’s yours?
I was obviously way ahead of the curve on that, since everyone and his mother says story is vital these days when it comes to corporate communications and marketing. That is so last decade ago, at least in my world. And I have the written proof.
With spring around the corner, I am of half a mind to do some spring cleaning. I even got as far as clicking on various emails to see if I could trash them. I started with the easy ones, such as those pesky confirmations of registering for a site I may have only visited once. I thought, “Hey, that’s a great place to start. I don’t even know what most of these are or why I signed up.”
I couldn’t part with a single one. They are still all there. I would put my cursor on the trash button and not be able to go through with it. I would find myself saying, “But I may want to go back to historicshipwrecks.com someday. I’d better save the welcome letter.
I think I’m beginning to understand the hoarder mind. I just count myself lucky that it’s all digital, filling up my hard drive and my mind rather than a moving truck. Gawd, that would be a costly move, let me tell you (in an email, of course, so I can save it).
In the Emerald City, looking at a terabit drive to go with my four bedroom home,
– Robb