I'm cursed with memory. Practically rotten with it. Slice me open, and the stink of it gets underneath your mask and settles over every corner of the operating theatre. The gas turns to crystal when it hits your lungs and it burns like the air outside on a bright winter day.

I wrote that, a while ago. I also wrote this:

Sometimes I play with the past. I pick it up, roll it around on my fingertips, stretch and pull at it. I roll around in it like a dog with a dead skunk. Sometimes I press it against the newspaper and lift up perfect mirror images of the funny pages beneath. I probe it with the tip of my tongue, looking for the sweet and the sour, the savory spots on it. Late at night, when no one’s around, I like to take someone else’s memories out and try them on. To look at myself in the mirror, and see if I could pass as a different man, a man with another past, but underneath, I always look like a man with the past I have.

It’s a dangerous thing, to play with the past that way, to wallow in it and let it take over your all of your waking thoughts. Sometimes I play this game where I imagine I’ve won the lottery and I begin plotting how I won’t let it change my life, I’ll bank the money and only spend it to take away this horrible pressure of living. I think about the shady house in the country and the dependable (but used) car I’d buy. I promise not to quit my job. I can go on for weeks, daydreaming about this in my idle moments, working on my speech to the media about my incredible good fortune. I phrase and rephrase my sentences until they portray just the right mix of joy and astonishment.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about cleaning up my special little area of the basement in advance of prying little eyes and poking little hands finally overcoming their fears and parental objections and doing some exploring. And that’s made me think about memory and memories.

Lynn and I built a small (9’x12’) raised floor in a dry corner and I carpeted it to give myself a nice rumpus room to replace the bedroom I had initially taken over, soon to become Celia’s.

What’s down there? Most of the stuff I removed from that bedroom. All of my guitars and other musical stuff - some keyboards, hand percussion, a pedal steel guitar which was a birthday present to myself some years back and has remained largely unplayed since, an autoharp I inherited when my friend Jon moved, lotsa electronic stuff (effects pedals, cords, tape machines, like that). Soon the stuff that remains in this bedroom – the computers and their attendant books, the vinyl records, the stereo – will move down there as well.

There are lots of photos down there, too: old girlfriends, old crushes, old friends, about ten rolls from a class trip I took to Germany in high school (hi Cristoph, if you're reading this; I'm guessing Robben is...). Most of them are gone away to their own lives and are far removed from the days when we shared so many events and emotions. I have loads of handwritten letters from them, as well (for I am ancient enough to have lived in the pre-email epistolary age). The letters and postcards come from San Francisco, Georgia, Ohio, Arizona, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland and Maine; some come from other countries like Ecuador, Spain, Hungary and Scotland.

There also about a million cassette tapes down there: some legitimate releases, generally picked out of discount or record store bargain bins, mnany more of them mixtapes I labored long over, made either for myself or as tokens of friendship or (sometimes secret) love.

Some of those people attached to these totems are still in my life and of them I have more recent artifacts, hanging on my walls and sitting here by my computer.

Obviously all of that stuff has memories attached to it: the guitars I played in the various bands I was in all give me little jolts of the past (some good, some bad); the amp that followed me from junior high until now (thank you Acoustic, now, it would appear, sadly R.I.P.); loads of gig posters and photos; lyrics and lyric ideas scribbled on whatever paper was at hand; the postcards and letters and photos; the curios from my friends and strangers. Why do I have all of that? Waiting for my induction to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame? My long-awaited solo return? My biographers? The crack investigative team from the local constabulary?

Nah, probably not. Most likely it’s sitting there out of a combination of my own ennui and inertia as well as a feeling in the back of my mind that I really will get back to those days when I’d pick up the guitar and start noodling as unconsciously as I sit at the computer nowadays or that I’ll finally get around to writing all of those stories that are percolating in my noggin.

So that has led me to consider the nature of memories. Do I really need all of that stuff? No. As I grow older (and, one would hope, wiser), I am beginning to grasp that it’s not so much the objects that are important as the thoughts and feelings that are behind them, and those I can possess without needing space beyond what's between my ears. If the memories require anything more, they’re probably not necessary, nor are they really memories.

And so I feel ready to move on. We’ll see where to as we go along.

Fifteen years later caught in time's incinerator
Yesterday's worries are today's
But the good times are so near just sitting back and drinking beer
You know I'm halfway down the road but I know that I still ain't there
- Soul Asylum, "Can't Go Back" (Made To Be Broken)

UPDATE: Through the happy synchronicity of the web, I came across this link this morning - Why Do You Have So Much Junk?