April 17, 2010

Notebook, Memory, Nevermore

So long Penway 3x5. 2002, we will miss you.

Finally getting down to the nitty-gritty of cleaning the apartment. A real clean, where everything has its place, and whatever doesn't gets recycled, Goodwill-ed, composted or thrown away. Getting rid of notebooks. Just tossed one from 2002. This is basically one from my Kinokuniya days. I have all the initial notes: the book departments; staff names and their positions, what sections they bought for; and crudely drawn store layout maps. I have ideas: section logo 1" buttons to identify what sections staff headed (which I did make and some folks actually wore on their blue Kino aprons); an ill-thought bookworm mascot I was playing around with; thoughts and schematics for future punkpunk's that never made it off the ground, like a menko card set; and prose that never made it into stories. There's even notes on the proper way in Japanese to do credit card transactions with customers and other assorted Japanese bookshop lingo or customer service language I was unfamiliar with at the time. This is all gone now. It will fade. I have a horrible memory. As I'm shredding and tossing this all into the compost, towards the end, I'm feeling that I just threw away a whole year or at least a good six months of my past. Will I miss it? Probably not. Like I said, I have a horrible memory. It's just like it never existed.