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Flying Coach With Coach

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Current Mood:  accomplished

I spent a good portion of tonight working on my ongoing housecleaning.  Tonight, I tried to make yet another dent in my shredding of boxes of old paperwork.  There’s a ton of it.  Destroying all these documents.  Don’t ask me why, but I have virtually all of my pay stubs, and I’m not kidding.  I literally shredded hundreds of them tonight, back through my job selling pool supplies in 1996, my days at Blockbuster where I made so many friends, my entire PeopleSoft career from internship through consulting, my time at Mercury.  I had dozens of old credit card statements and receipts from those days too.  The last surviving records and mementos from my trip to Atlanta (complete with reminders of Crista), my stint in Thousand Oaks, etc.  Reading through some of them brought back memories.  The restaurants I ate at, the places I shopped.  Holding them in my hand tonight… the last person to touch this piece of paper was me 13 years ago.  A message from the past.

If you could, what would you say to the “you” of 13 years ago?  What advice would you give him?

Should I have kept these papers instead of destroyed them tonight?  Well, it made me wish I had been blogging or keeping a diary back then.  But in the end, I’m telling myself that keeping this stuff is like scrapbooking.  Why waste my current (and precious and limited) life cataloging my past life?  Life is short enough as it is.  As I said recently, there isn’t any time to dwell on the past.  We’ll all be dead before we have time to sort it out, catalog it, and enjoy the scrapbook.  So goodbye memories of Atlanta restaurants (like Dante’s Down The Hatch in Buckhead), and goodbye records of what hotels I stayed at on which consulting trips, and goodbye list of purchases from 2001.  There’s nothing to stop you from fading away now.  Those things seem important to me because they’re mine.  My life experiences.  But it’s so easy to get bogged down by the details of everyday life.  No one, including me, will ever need all this information.  There’s no reason to treat it like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Shredding all these papers, I shredded an offer letter I once got from a company in New York (Vitech).  I was making that career decision back around the time of my project in Reno.  I ultimately turned them down, but looking at this offer letter… it’s mind-boggling to think about all the different paths your life could go at any moment.  That job in New York you didn’t take.  That party you skipped.  The shoes you bought.  Chaos theory.  One little decision made differently, and who knows where your life would be now?  Maybe you’d be living overseas.  Maybe you would have never met me.  Maybe you’d be married. Maybe you’d have been hit by a car that very afternoon.  You can’t even get your head around it.  So many ways life could have been different.  And now, as ever, as always… infinite possibilities for your future.  And mine.

After all those musings, if you’re now bored, Starla advises you to go look at this fucking hipster.

I braved getting on a plane this last weekend for a quick round trip, for the first time in over a year.  I was expecting the worst, but despite Murphy’s Law being in full effect (my initial flight was cancelled, the flight I did get on was completely packed, turbulence so bad the passengers clapped when we landed), I survived and felt pretty good about the whole thing.  I got to meet up with Colin and his girls for a brief tea, and then it was back to the Bay.  There’s also a questionable picture Selene took of Colin and I.  I’ll see if I can nick it and put it up for you voyeurs.  Quick side note, on the flight to Burbank, Todd Bridges was on board, and on the flight back, so was Coach’s Craig T. Nelson.

I continue to hear positive feedback about that Blackthorn show a couple weekends back.  Big shows coming up, and some changes in the works regarding my gear.  I won’t bore you with the details here and now.  But I might next time.  🙂  Anyway, in addition to providing the clever title for this blog, the quote of the week comes from Sus, on the subject of her assuming absolute power over TCB:

“The whole band bear dances right now!!!  Oh my goodness, I’m so close to getting you guys to do it, I can feel it.”

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2 Comments to “Flying Coach With Coach”

  1. Don’t feel too bad, I have a filing cabinet with old pay stubs from 1996 (they keep popping up in old folders too) and the one thing I REALLY need to get rid of is old utility bills that were paid, and credit cards I’ve cancelled.

    Oh, and the hipsters… I felt like I was looking at photos of all the kids I go to art school with and I got the cold chills.

  2. That Starla’s a clever girl with some excellent advice 😉

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