So, I made sure to majorly thank the one (older) resident who likes purple, for those wonderful Lotus Biscoff cookies that she gave me the other week.
And, I asked her a bit more about her husband's love of them.
She said that he served in the war in Belgium, but he didn't try them then, but only afterwards, and for years they'd buy them whenever they'd come across them, but you can get them at Costco now, where they actually happen to be on sale, do you ever go to Costco.
During my cleaning, I also uncovered business cards, that I sometimes set aside, because sometimes I think I'd like to revive the memories of whoever was in there.
So, I slipped them into my most recent envelope, like I've kept for simply years now; I take a manilla envelope and slip ephemera in there and mark the date on the outside of when I started that, and then eventually it fills up and I tape the top and mark on the outside when it finished, and then I go and start up a new envelope.
And, I have a small taped-up box full of a number of these envelopes, and like maybe 3-5 other more recent ones that were in my big office supplies bin that I keep a lot of random stuff in that I access fairly frequently, like the logbook where I've been listing for years now all of the books that I read for recreation, with rough start and finish dates, if I don't mess those up.
Lately I've been thinking that before I move, I'd like to open up all of the envelopes and spend some time with whatever's in there; maybe see some stuff, have a memory and its fullness, and set aside the truly essential in new envelopes, maybe to look at again one day.
And, the rest, I'd like to have a bonfire of, a bonfire of me. Just things that have been there and served their time, and that I've now seen again, and that I'm ready to set free into the past.
Somehow this just seems right.
A notebook of background interviews, when I was doing what turned out to be my first successful financial expose.
Again, just a glimpse of me, then.
That was like the 2nd or 3rd to the last item in the last box on my back porch.
I've often heard it said that there aren't circles in life, but more spirals, where you come back around to where you were, but on a new level.
I finally cleaned my apartment top-to-bottom, and it was interesting to finally come to the last boxes that I hadn't opened in years, the ones that I kept in a small pile on my back indoor porch.
The very last one had some binders with linguistics stuff from college that I had tucked away, that I had thought years ago that I might get rid of, but then realized that they might be useful some day, somehow, in a way that I couldn't quite put my finger on.
And, interestingly enough, they are now, since recently I've been realizing that the ancient language I'm studying could benefit from a better form of education like I had in my undergraduate language classes.
And, there was a binder with this one weird ancient religion I once took a class on during my master's, where I saved all the material because I felt that there was something there, compared to some other stuff where it was clear that I could dispose of it.
And, interestingly enough, I now realize that there might be something interesting tucked away in that religion, about conceptualization of revelation, and it's actually tied into stuff that I've been thinking about now for a number of years, but after I had had that class, and certainly not during the time that I was taking it.
I also found a few small notebooks, and this list of when I started an ultimately successful secret unionization drive, where I was like "Fuck this" and started gaming out numbers for a potential bargaining unit and had done initial recon on who was tucked away where, organizationally. It was the very last thing I looked at, and it was just so intense and driven and "Fuck you" fuck-with-the-system in a way that I haven't been for a few years now, and it was interesting to see this glimpse of my past self, and not necessarily in a way that I disliked it, in fact I admired it and I tucked the notebook away in my files, just like a friend told me I definitely should, but at the same time I've been kind of firmly getting away from that in what I've been getting into of late, and I don't really feel a need now to go back into that headspace and just that sheer drive that I see in it. It's just the past.
There's this one old (Catholic) church building in my neighborhood that has "John Nepomucene" engraved on the front of it, and the other week when I was riding on a train on a long-distance train trip, I passed by some church building that said "John Nepomuk" on the front of it, and all of a sudden I connected the two, as well as realized that that must also be the middle name of this one composer "Johann Nepomuk Hummel" who I hear about on the radio all the time, on this one classical music station that I listen to.
A few days ago I gathered up all of the electronics and whatnot that I had been setting aside for years to go take away to electronics recycling - a few dead laptops and a few dead phones and a lot of cords and some dead batteries and whatnot, all of which feels so good to go and get out of my house - and then the next day before work I got up really early and I went to go drop them off at this one computer repair store in a yuppie neighborhood on my way to work that I've patronized before and that does all that as a favor for people.
But, after I had hopped off at this one subway stop and was walking up to the computer store, suddenly there were all of these people on the sidewalk, and I look again, and it's all of these parents and all of these very young children, white and blonde and in sort of expensive early winter gear just standing out in huge clusters along the edge of this one glass facade built into a building, and I see a clinic sign there, and I suddenly realize that they're all waiting in line to get the vaccine that's now available for the children, now.
And, I remember that we're still in the pandemic that I've been trying to be surviving, and it's like I let my guard down, and I could suddenly maybe feel that maybe this could be more over soon, and I just started crying some, but just a little, since I was forced to stop and look at everything that we've been experiencing, which you usually just don't do since you're in the middle of it, and we have been for months and months and months, for well over a year and a half now.
