a bloodied bus schedule from Northern Spain. A photo of a goulash shop in Prague. Questionable Dutch video memberships. The physical act of unpacking, breaking this mass into the scantest shards of paper is the easy part. Unpacking the story from that little piece of paper, loaded with meaning, is volatile. Like the big bang. Unpacking a memory can be like defusing a bomb.

Cards. The collection of cards that you stick in your wallet until you can’t shut it anymore, you put the cards in some drawer somewhere (or a grey suitcase) and go about collecting more cards. Fill wallet again, empty wallet again (assuming the gypsies don’t steal it), repeat - until the discarded cards pile up in a stack in the drawer and its 10 years later. Same goes for menus, tickets, playbills, x-mas cards from x-tended family, etc. Do you sort all these things by type? — so all cards, menus, tickets go together but are of different age and origin? Or do you sort by provenance with all various types mixed together? And do you then keep these birds of a feather in unruly piles on a table, or neatly in laminated sheets in an album, or splayed out on a corkboard for wall display, or stuffed into a Hollinger box? or back into the gray suitcase?

Or do you scan them, upload them into various social software packages and hyperlink them together across domains, making your life accessible again to all the people who made these stories matter, and who can then perhaps enhance the gaps in your stories and in your own fuzzy memory?

Right now, everything’s just in piles. A forty-pack of ziploc bags on the kitchen counter, a sharpie, and a roll of scotch tape. I’ve got to clear this space, and looking at this stuff makes me want to reach for the wine - but - provenance it is. Who cares if I mix the cards, photos, and letters. It’s the experiences that count.

Signing of now. Polished off a bottle of riesling. I’m typing this into an old school green-screen word processor called darkroom, because I’m less fond of cryptic european-street-sign buttons when all want to do is write. I feel like Doogie Howser. [cursor flashes pensively]. If you get that last sentence, you’re old, like me. Cue the synthesizers, outro.