Tonight I lost what I never knew I had

For over 20 years I've used floppy disks--a lot of them. I collected disks--I scavenged disks, kept things on disks--transferred writings to disks, where they sat on disks, in the dustbin of my desk and waited and waited for me to use them.





They waited on me, or at least I thought they waited on me...

I dreamed they waited on me. My disks were my life, or what I thought were my memories, of everything I thought I had to save.

I kept them, thinking i would look at all my old writings, would go back to them in desperation, or in triumph and people would look at what I wrote, even as an undergraduate, and I would have to transfer all that I wrote from that time in my life--I would transfer everything back from the "dust bin of History"--My history.

That is what I thought, so i sat and let my disks sit, for years and years, and i held onto those disks which i thought were me. And it took a good woman to help me let go of those disks.




It took her to make me give them over and to let her take them outside and smash them with a hammer. I couldn't watch that of course--as the hammer went down upon the fragile plastic and what were in my mind's eyes my memories.--my father. I heard the sickening crack of them, and i rolled on my side and let her do it--because I knew she was trying to save me--albeit rough and brutal. She was trying to help me.

And she did.

More soon.

James