-- Monday, February 21, 2000 --

2:47 a.m. Today is as good a day as any to show you the bane of my existence. The thing I never get to. The thing that stares back at me every single day. A big stack of guilt.

The rain continued to pound part of the day away, pressing into cracks and crevices and surprise-ruining a few things here and there. It burst through the ceiling of the laundry room and almost destroyed some old vintage patterns, but I caught it in time and stuck a poinsettia under the stream.

Of course, these hated, dreadful boxes are snug and dry. There are 21 of them and they are each stuffed to overflowing. They are heavy. You could very easily pull out your back. You will brush against spiders and you will get nasty paper cuts. They also have a tendency to shift and come crashing over onto the floor in a big messy pile.

All the detritus of a paper business, dragged from house to house, unpacked, repacked, stashed in the garage, except in this incarnation, there is no garage. A lot of really gruesome, neglected stuff because we used to own some rental properties and Igor has written quite a few books on true crime.

What to keep and what to throw away? If you're overly cautious, you're supposed keep at least 7 years of receipts, unless there is a dispute, in which you have to keep 7 years ahead of the dispute. I'm pretty sure about that, but not certain. "When in doubt, don't throw it out" has always been my motto.

If you have a business of your own, I believe you have to keep everything, for ever and for all time. You never know when you're going to need a paper trail. It's not crazy. I can do this. I can actually organize all this ancient and yellowing and crumbling history into a cohesive, cleaned-up stack of records. I can.

Maybe not today, but soon. Not tomorrow, of course, because I've got to spend the day at Kinko's. playing with color chips. Wednesday -- not good. Ditto the rest of February. Hmmm. When would be a good time to file?

It would only be on one of those days when your little thimble of Half 'n Half says "Drink Me" on the lid and you do and the day suddenly opens up like a staircase in a Busby Berkley musical and the hours stretch to infinity. There's a big box for the letter A and the pages magically flutter into it, stapled and chronologically ordered.

And so forth and so on.

Preposterous, you say? (Hi Kay!) Just a crazy, compulsive dream? Well, one of these days I'm going to replace those boxes with a regiment of dun-colored filing cabinets and then we'll see who's living in fantasy. It could happen.

Meanwhile, I'd like to move them out of my line of sight so they will stop dogging and nagging me. Maybe I should drag them, one by one, up the stairs and away to the laundry room. I have just the corner for them. I'll just move this poinsettia ...