May. 17, 2005 - 18:31 MDT

KNEE DEEP

When in the course of human events one finds that it is hard to sort through papers looking for one thing or another sorely needed, failing miserably -- until a couple of days later it comes to light in a totally unexpected place. Day to day seeing that mountain growing exponentially, I had to make a decision.

Finally, today I decided to do something about this state of affairs in my baliwick.

Webtv was given to me on my birthday in 1999 about the time I had completely lost patience with trying to hear TV -- and what I could hear was those disgusting commercials. After I retired and caught up with MASH, Soap, Northern Exposure on closed caption where possible I spent my spare time reading.

Reading is a panacea for me, yet I needed contact with other humans that I couldn't hear well enough to obtain it with friends and family. In surfing the web I Googled myself crazy, delving into one thing or another. Then, one day I stumbled on an on-line journal. In that journal were links to other journals. It was almost like sitting across the table from the writer of one or another of those journals and listening to their thoughts. I was in an ideal situation in that I could "hear" with my "eyes." And I liked it to the point of being overjoyed.

But the good part was yet to come. E-mail with people who wrote journals, Al Schroeder's Nova-Notes had a question at the end of each entry -- a sort of forum type of thing as one could answer the question and see other folks answers to them too. I began to e-mail others who had made comments.

That is just the prelude to the subject of tonight.

For six years I have been jotting down addys, urls, and things such as that. Writing little scribbles of other folks humor I wanted to remember and snorting out a bit of doggerel and haikus now and then.

All of that plus other bits of data would be periodically heaped up and put on top of what went before. Occasionally a heap would slide to the floor and would be gathered up and stacked helter-skelter somewhere.

Today, being the first day of the rest of my life, I took a big gnaw on the bullet and tried to straighten the mess out.

In file folders I now have one for addys, one for urls, one for my writings, one for humor yadda, yadda, yadda, file folders in a box at hand to be worked on as time goes by. At least I will be able to sort through them, one subject at a time and possibly be able to toss stuff after it is put in a ding-bat data bank of sorts.

Of course that is just the beginning of the mass clean up of my cave. But there will be more, to the point things will be so squeaky neat that my impulse to make a mess, any mess will overwhelm me and I'll manage to create a monster that no man can conquer. Or sumpin'.

But for the nonce, proud of myself for the effort, I am in a blizzard of papers -- free -- no longer KNEE DEEP . . . . . . . . . . .

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