There’s a bulletin board that hangs next to my desk in the room I occupy in my communal house. I’ve had it for years (the bulletin board, that is). I got it at a yard sale ages ago, when I was decorating a home I had just bought with my girlfriend at the time. It followed me to the apartment I moved into when that relationship ended and the house was gone, then came with me here to Elam Ave. Today, I finally decided to take down a decade’s worth of detritus that still stubbornly clung to it, a symbol of my hoarder mentality. New year, new start, I thought.
Ralph Baldwin… now there’s a name I hadn’t heard in a while. I knew him through my anti-war activism in the early ’00s. He died years ago, but his business card was still held in place by a yellow thumbtack. A phone number for Ray Burnett, a musician I knew from the Greensboro blues scene, also deceased. Contact info for performance venues that had long ceased to exist, and people whose names didn’t ring a bell. Who were Mike, Evan and Ken? I have no idea.
A traffic citation, since paid, from the city of Greensboro. And more poignant things; the phone number for a ex-girlfriend’s sister (she must have been staying at her house for the weekend, I think) and contact info for another ex-girlfriend, received when the relationship was just beginning and accompanied by a small doodle. A photo of my late cat sitting on my guitar-strewn bed.
I wonder if this coupon for a free set of strings from the Music Barn would still be honored? There’s a Post-it note with “sound engineer gig” and a phone number on it. Did I take that gig? Maybe it’s still available; I could certainly use the money. I’m pretty sure I did apply for the job as a staff writer at NCA&T that’s written on another Post-it note, though. I guess I didn’t get it, if I haven’t heard from them by now.
Some of this stuff I may keep. I have an obsessive need to hold on to the minutiae from my past: old gig flyers, CDs from bands I did sound for, toys I got out of cereal boxes when I was a kid, even the card that shows I passed the general employee training at the Shearon Harris nuclear plant (I lost that job after failing the psychological exam… twice). My life is more than just the sum of a bunch of random notes and mementos, but sometimes I have a hard time believing that.