Keys to Nothing

I signed up for an editing workshop. We are to bring an excerpt for something we're working on. We are to state two techniques that we're good at. We are to submit questions for the person conducting the workshop.

I can't figure out where to upload that stuff either. I hate my homework being late still.

I'm contemplating the word irrelevant, in a social media realm of OK, boomer.

And contemplating the word control. I know in my brainpan somewhere that control is an illusion, that we control nothing, including what our brain decides to save into long term memory. My friend and I talk about this a lot. If we have no control, even of how our brain functions, then who or what does?

Irrelevant. We also discuss the difference between mind and brain. There's an analogy we came up with that both of us wrote down, but I don't remember it, and I'm not sure we are equipped to handle unanswerable questions. Examine how much life is left to you. Contemplate infinity. See how that works for you.

But the workshop signup started a chain of events that feels exciting.

I've been writing the story I will learn about editing for 15 years. It's memoir, so it's personal. Friends who have read the blog posts over the years love the stories about the wild ride caregiving is. There are about 60 million people in the USA who are caregiving right now, so maybe there's an interested audience, too.

So there's that to finish. Complete. Settle.

I bought a couch. One I picked out for myself. It's too much in the packed living room. What needs to go? My mother's secretary, which is a lovely piece of really large furniture. Her buffet that she bought for her trousseau in 1948? My great- and grandmother's desk that I had brought here when we sold her house? Most furnniture in the house is not mine, not pieces I chose. I don't like antiques. I keep them because? I keep them because of stories. I know the stories of all this furniture. Story provenance.

I told the friend who agreed to take the buffet that there wasn't anything in it. Then I dumped out the drawers. What's in it are all the things I did not want to throw away or hand out over the years.

It's a week later and most of the stuff is on the floor. Because in order to put it in one of the 2 remaining desks, I have to empty those, too.

Each day I choose something to put in the garbage bag sitting next to the pile on the floor. My father kept keys to things he no longer owned, including car keys. There are stories to those keys. But the stories are not mine. I threw them all out, inspired by Stu in The Stand (which I just reread) who–broke legged and dying in the wilderness–goes through his pockets and finds a keyring with keys that will open nothing. He throws them into the gulch. I did likewise.

Editing. The work and the psyche. Can't fill a vessel that's already full. This furniture offload is the equivalent of emptying the Junk Drawer of Life. Time to broom survival techniques that no longer serve, and have only been accumulating more stuff I can't use but don't want to look at too closely.

Stories are wonderful. Stories are how humans explain the universe to themselves. Edited stories are even more wonderful.

Time for my stories.