Inertial Residue

You would be surprised at what I threw away yesterday.

Actually, maybe I’m the only one who would be surprised. More likely, what got thrown away wouldn’t be as surprising to you as the fact that I threw it away. Even more likely, the only surprising part will be that I threw it away only yesterday.

A little context: it’s 2007. That’s a new year and, according to the calendars, my thirty-second even if I wasn’t at liberty to ring in the first one. I was, however, around to kick off the thirty-first, and I did it with style.

Well, less style, I suppose, than flash. As 2006 was getting under way, I ended a two-year relationship. I came one-half of a bloody mary away from moving to Mississippi. A buddy of mine almost died in San Francisco, and, while visiting him, I turned a corner on that town. I also spent a little time reflecting on how uncertain our futures are. Through a suspiciously opportunistic logical structure, that milieu of events gave rise to a series of self-destructive benders that essentially lasted for the rest of the year and even escalated around the time of my thirtieth birthday.

(One notable hiatus from the Great Bender of 2006 is the two weeks I spent in Europe with four hundred high school students. When you ask yourself later how it is I’ve managed to live in the same town, much less work at the same place, for three years, remember that my employers periodically pay for me to go places. Admittedly, those places are more frequently along the lines of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania than along the lines of Prague and Budapest, but they are still more interesting than a punch in the junk. At least in the short term.)

While my fresh, though perhaps fuzzy, memories of “celebrating the immediacy of life” (through spontaneous unilateral public disrobing, amateur dental work, and ill-conceived propositions, face-to-face and via text messaging service) give me little in the way of serious regret, I thought beginning 2007 by bringing greater order to my personal sphere might serve as a nice foil to the bacchanalian excess of its predecessor. As an early step toward pursuing that goal, I decided it was finally time to unpack my belongings and move in to my new place.

“Your new place? But, Paul, didn’t you just move in May?”

Yes, that is the “new place.” Didn’t I just tell you I spent most of 2006 making irresponsible choices in thought and deed?

As I was saying, I spent most of yesterday finally unpacking the boxes in my room. Unlike all of the other Saturdays I have ostensibly dedicated to that very goal in the past seven months, yesterday evening found me with everything neatly stored on the vast shelving units I acquired and assembled in a brief moment of clarity back in October. That’s a lie. Not everything is on a shelf. There are three large garbage bags full of stuff that fell victim to the aforementioned impulse toward greater order and an attendant drive to decrease my inertial residue.

Inertial residue? That’s a good question, and I’m glad you asked it. In classic Socratic style, I answer your projected question with a question. Actually, with a series of questions which serve as a rubric for identifying inertial residue: Why do I have this item? Is it only because I’ve had it for a long time? Do I derive any present satisfaction or use from it? Is there reasonable expectation of deriving any future satisfaction or use from it? If I dispose of this item and later discover a need for it, is it of such nature that it cannot be recovered or replaced?

If all answers are no, then the item in question is inertial residue and can therefore, under the terms of my unpacking at least, be discarded. Most of the yeses found their way to a shelf. So, what were the nos?

I threw away three pairs of Converse tennis shoes that I have lugged around and doted on since high school. There was one pair of One Stars that hasn’t been comfortable since the turn of the century because I walked the heel of both insoles out some time in the late 90s. There were two pairs of All Stars, one worn out and the other almost unscuffed. The worn pair was white. Not the Brilliant White but that low-key canvas off-white. I bought them at a JC Penney shoe clearance sale in 1993 at the Oglethorpe Mall in Savannah, Georgia because it was the only pair they had in my size. I never liked wearing the white ones (even before Labor Day) because they made my feet look so big. Of course, that didn’t stop me from walking through them in the usual places: in the sole at the ball of both feet and the outside of both heels, in the upper at the pinky toe and below the inside ankle. The unworn pair was olive drab with one burgundy and one black stripe down the side. I bought them in 1994 (the day after OJ’s famous low-speed chase) because I thought it would be cool to wear Chucks with Army colors on them since I had just graduated from military high school: “Who’s walking on whom now, Army?” In a gross lack of foresight, I bought them in spite of the fact they were a half-size too small. I never could stuff my feet in them long enough to wear them out, although my hand-scribblings on the white side of the soles indicate I did manage to wear them to my freshman calculus class on at least one occasion. (“ei + eπ = 0” must have made me laugh uproariously at some point.)

Another garbage bag holds the bulk of my cassette tape collection. All in all, there are about three hundred tapes consigned to meet their maker (assuming their maker is a DC landfill), but I didn’t throw away all of them. About fifty or so found a place on a shelf. There’s Sports by Huey Lewis and the News because it was the first tape I ever bought after I listened to the album over and over again on vinyl when I spent the night at Caleb Shaffer’s house in second grade. There’s The Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill because it’s the first tape I remember stealing from my brother. There’s the companion tape to the Justice League of America in The Lunar Invaders because I still get a metallic taste in my mouth when I hear that opening laser attack on Moonbase Peace. There’s the cassingle of Biz Markie singing “Just a Friend” because it reminds how self-satisfied I was paying three bucks for that instead of getting suckered out of nine for the entire album. There is even a handful of unlabeled tapes on which my brother and I captured a strange pastiche of recordings – radio broadcasts we inexplicably valued, each other’s voices in various modes of song and declamation – with our Fisher-Price recorder (a tool we used until well after either of us were properly toddling).

And, of course, there are the mixed tapes. I kept them all, the ones made for me and the ones I made for others, although I didn’t get wise to the idea of keeping a copy for myself until well in to my mixed tape career. There’s the one mailed to me by the first girl I ever kissed. The cuts from The Muppet Movie and Monty Python and the Holy Grail and her father’s Stevie Ray Vaughan albums are enlivened by the hiss and pops of the record player from which she recorded them. There are the copies of mixes I made to convince the recipients to make out with me. (They failed far more often than they succeeded. I have, in later years, come to realize that the unmistakable and irresistible overtures I agonizingly wove throughout such mixes were anything but.)

Along with the hundreds of tapes in the garbage bag outside my door, I placed the half-dozen or so blank cassette tapes I have carried around with me for years and years because I knew I would need them some day to make The Perfect Mixed Tape for The Perfect Occasion. With that, I finally acknowledged the end of the mixed-tape era. There is a place on my shelf for a copy of the last mixed tape I ever made, the last mixed tape I will ever make. It is only fitting that I made it four years ago, a decade after I first promised it.

And so, I am sitting here at my finally usuable desk, listening to a shuffled selection from my immense digital music collection, resting my feet – in shoes I bought in the current millennium – on the uncluttered floorspace around me, and quietly reinforcing my belief in the necessity of actively making room for the important things.

Happy new year.