BABYMETAL

I found this at boingboing, and it's pretty much got my head in a vise now. Amazacrazy.

1000 Pieces of Paper

Tonight I emptied a box labeled "1000 Pieces of Paper". I filled 1000 Pieces of Paper some time after college, before I moved away to work for TSR. It was full of college papers and notes and things I wrote.

 A whole lot of it got recycled tonight and a little of it got kept and winnowed into a smaller box.

We've been on a throwing-away kick around here lately. Player 3 has a proliferating amount of his own stuff, and the house has only revealed three dimensions for storage. 

It is a solution of cleansing and sorrow to do this. Saying goodbye to things is more than the things. It is saying goodbye to the person you were or wanted to be when you decided to store those things in the first place.

I've often thought that I'd be happier if a storm blew through our house and destroyed all my stuff. I would miss it, but not much. The DIY version of this however, requires you to bring the catastrophe. You must eventually destroy yourself if natural disaster won't oblige.

In the intervening 20 years, I've changed out some contents of 1000 Pieces of Paper. But it still contained a lot of mass from the mid '90s. Mass I've hauled across the country twice with a few extra tour dates added.

Looking through it tonight was a date with shame. Zippy was an ok dude. Fun at parties. But his interior life was confused and frequently depressed and ohgod so immature. I doubt I could look 24-year-old me in the eye.

A big part of the loss was realizing how terrible a thinker I was. Shallow. Dim. My philosophy notes were nonsensical. My writing had so little perspective. Now I have to put that down. I was never brilliant, and I'm probably not pulling it out in a pinch. I cannot be who I wanted to be; I have to be who I am. It's grounding, but palpably disappointing.

Here's some brightness: I saved nearly everything to do with role-playing games. A bunch of really dumb ideas there too, but the Russian judge was easily ignored as I reviewed those. Half-formed hopes about your future are disposable once you collect the courage and/or wisdom to do it. But creativity has no shelf life. You never know when something you made can be remade. Can't throw that away, however dumb it was.

I failed to grasp most of the Theological Perspectives on Modern Literature class I took in 1990. I don't need reminders of that. But as I storm middle age in 2014, I want every gun I ever drew on a church bulletin in my bag. I've got some personal demons to fuck up, and that cartoon with the surprisingly sophisticated perspective is probably a better tool for the job than a 5-page paper circumscribing my precise failure to grasp Camus.