I realize I am a product of my time, and that time is passing. There is a down side to bragging about my ability to untangle a phone cord and other bygone skills: there are whole generations of people who do not know what life was like in that foreign country that is the past. Assuming my heirs and assigns look at what I leave behind and don’t just hire a dumpster and start tossing things out the window, I need to provide context for why certain things are there.
I have no inventory but I am leaving behind a minimum of seven and a maximum of fifteen bankers boxes filled with scrap paper: that is, eight and a half by eleven inch paper which has been used on one side but is blank on the other. Once excellent for those with typewriters, the size is still useful for computer printers. (Note to self: why 8 ½ x 11? Who made THAT the standard?) (Note to future archaeologists: this also explains the twelve typewriters I wore out and which sit in storage. Gee, I wish I still had that one that was used by the OSS in…but that’s w hole nother blog.)
You will ask: why so much scrap paper, Uncle Blogsy? Don’t you naturally just write on your computer and save stuff in the cloud? Why print anything out, and, even if you do, how long will it take you to use all that paper? Well, young’uns, let me tell you a true tale. There is no point in blaming ME for some of my life decisions.
It’s Johnny Carson’s fault.
I shouldn’t have to explain why, in a world where an online commentator speaks and governments tremble, why Johnny Carson was such a power for good and evil back in the day when I was starting my writing career. I will not try, in the space provided here, to take you back to those amazing days when we still had troops in Vietnam and those of us in school were being warned not to let our hair grow past our collars. This was the era of the Gasoline Shortage, when Americans who had lived their lives in calm assurance that they could drive anywhere thanks to beautiful highways and plentiful fuel, were suddenly mortgaging their spouses and waiting in line for hours to buy gasoline at the new unimaginable price of thirty0seven cents a gallon.
And one night, Johnny noted this shortage and made a joke about shortages of toilet paper.
To be clear, there WAS no such shortage: he was just making a joke about shortages. But once again, Americans responded, valuing speed over verification. Suddenly there WAS a shortage of toilet paper, as people rushed to assure they would have the proper supply of their favorite.
The side effect was that suddenly, ALL kinds of paper began to disappear,as companies turned more of their production into rolls of tissue, and….
Deep in the wilds of ancient Iowa, a youngster already writing bestselling novels no one would ever read discovered his local retailers were tripling the price of typing paper. And, working on an allowance only occasionally augmented by a sale of fiction, our dewy-eyed artist said “Hey, why am I throwing away all this paper that I’ve used for typing on just one side?” He started setting aside his first drafts, so he could flip them over for use. When he spotted flyers and junk mail which included 8 ½ x 11 paper, he set this aside as well. These pages would do for rough drafts.
I could track his habit through the years, as he found himself in colleges where term papers found their way into the trash at regular intervals, and book fairs, where people might donate half a box of unused letterhead, but let’s leave that for researchers who dig through my papers years hence in search of anything to explain that Nobel Prize. You begin to understand all this hoarding of paper (which I do use, when I can find a box buried under the boxes of things bound to be collectable one day.)
So that is that. And now maybe I won’t need to blog about why, after I started using a looseleaf notebook with pages which are half the size of a piece of standard typing paper…see, there’s this little suitcase full of HALF pages torn from…. I was just…. Anyway, it’s Johnny’s fault.
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