Artifact 1

Now I keep a Word document of thoughts, notes, ideas
that never get executed, that changes daily and that I email to myself so I
always have a version. Currently, it's 38 pages and I'm typing into it right
now. But I used to keep notebooks, a fact that completely forgot about until I discovered
about twenty of all sizes, many only half or three-fourths filled, while
unpacking. I don't know how you forget such a thing, but it's true, I've
forgotten things that only happened 15 years ago, which is refreshing in some
way because it reminds me that the '90s were actually a long time ago, not just
a few years back as I'm sometimes fooled into believing. Time isn't really
slipping by in nanoseconds at all.

This one appears to the one I brought to NYC with me
because it has Portland business in it as well as midtown addresses, mostly for
interviews I was going on in '98. (Um, I say mostly because I just looked up
the address I wrote in the upper right hand corner for so-called 30 Rock, and
suite 800E was the Rosie O'Donnell Show, a place I never visited in my life.
Maybe I was looking for tickets for a family member?)

The notebook was open to this page. And it's weird
because it was clearly used by the guy, twenty years my senior, that I was
dating at the time. It caught my attention primarily because I'm mentioned in
the first set of to-dos with the heading I can't make out fully (Organize
Mailing?) above William T. Vollman, the author of crazy dense, long books, seven-volume 3,300-page crazy and long, none
of which I've ever read to this day. Maybe when I have a spare six months?

I don't even recall how they knew each other, though
I did briefly meet Vollman (or maybe just saw hanging out on a bed with the
roommates) once over at the guy's house, I think because he was seeing a woman
who worked at Powell's and the roommates also worked at Powell's (if you didn't
work at the public library, you worked at Powell's, though the library was a
better gig because it paid more and you got benefits even part time).

The Dalles trip, referenced in the second-grouping
of to-dos, was one of the last things I did before moving. I'd never been to
Eastern Oregon (and have still never been south really, like to Crater Lake and
environs) before unless you count Kah-Nee-Ta, one of a number of Indian-owned
resorts (Sunriver also springs to mind) in the desert marketed to sun-deprived
Oregonians west of the Cascades, that I had truly forgotten about until I saw a
high school person on Facebook mention going there. In Pendleton for the
weekend, I shopped at junk stores and Wal-Mart, ate at an Indian casino, drove
the guy up winding hills to isolated houses where schlubby middle-aged men (maybe named Chuck per note above?) who
collected Native American art lived and sold antique negatives (the point of
the trip–the guy printed old photos for a living) while their wives tried to
figure out the relationship between me and this guy while the men talked shop,
and drank whisky in a motel bed while watching an episode of CHiPs starring Ike
Eisenmann.

There are far more artifacts waiting to be discovered in my piles of cardboard.