My desk is a total mess. Yet somehow, in some way, I'm able to locate everything on it at will. Have you ever had this experience? Back when you were a kid, I'm sure one day you'd come home from school to find that your Mom had cleaned your room...and all of a sudden you couldn't find anything. A disaster of epic proportions, to be sure.
Tonight my wife and her friend performed elaborate surgery on our collection of Guster paraphernalia, and proceeded to spread its entrails all over our living room rug. In the middle of it all, it occurred to me that there were two setlists and a Guster gazette in the middle of the tornadic disaster that is my work area, so I walked in, plucked them from their hiding place, and delivered them back to the operating room. And now as I sit back down in front of my computer, I realize what a precarious pile of detritus my desktop has become. A random sampling of my desk, from left to right:
- A Béla Fleck & the Flecktones ticket stub from April 9th, 2003 (great show, by the way - if you're into the SHN thing you can download it from the Live Music Archive hosted at archive.org.
- Three random Blues Traveler analog cassettes (11-20-90, 4-12-94 and 4-30-93).
- A packet of blank address labels that don't really stick too well to packages.
- Scads of blank, written, labeled and unlabeled CDs. I still haven't decided if I'm not counting them out of laziness or out of fear of realizing how many are actually on my desk. I might be able to get away with saying that they multiply of their own accord if it weren't for the heavenly host of bubble mailers that descend upon Viv's poor mailbox at work on a weekly basis.
- One of my business cards, turned upside down, with a listing of the artists who guested with Guster on an encore of "Signs" (yes, the song made famous by Tesla) from 6-29-03 in Pittsburgh.
- My wife's photo of a truck of "New Amsterdam" beer, taken on one of her many insane road trips.
- A note that "THIS IS NOT A BILL" from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue. No, it's a notice that you're taking money away from me THAT ISN'T YOURS.
- My college transcript from Middlebury. Try though I might, I can't erase that D in freshman year calculus. Though Carol Haddad, wherever you are, a) guess my lack of calc skillz didn't really hurt my job hunt at all in the field of publishing and multilingualism, and b) thank you for giving me a D when I went into the final with an average exam score of 38.
- A "That's Funny!" page-a-day calendar, which most frequently isn't. Today's joke is rather good, though: "A lady came up to me on the street and pointed at my suede jacket. 'You know a cow was murdered for that jacket?' she sneered. I replied in a psychotic tone, 'I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too." --Jake Johansen" The saddest thing about this is that I actually know that they misspelled the comedian's name thanks to hours of watching the old Comedy Channel back when they actually showed...comics.
- A roll of brown packaging tape. One never can have enough.
- A roll of clear packaging tape. See above.
- The SuperPages for the greater Andover area. I mistakenly thought it was the Yellow Pages, but no...it's the SUPERPages. My mistake.
- Several things I just haven't thrown out yet - a dead battery, a phone number that's already been put into our cell phone, and a dry-cleaning tag. Hmm.
- A tape measure. In case I need to measure things...sitting at my desk...next!
- Tickets to upcoming shows (cool...apparently my desk is "In Stereo, Where Available" - tickets on both sides!
In the middle there's about a square foot of space which encompasses the entirety of my ability to move my mouse. Which I think I'll do right now.
>>publish!<<
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