The Dangers of Keeping Track

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Discoveries, as the word suggests, often turn up in unexpected places. Of course, you can invest tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and years in planning and mount a fabulously complex expedition of exploration at great personal risk. You can load it all up and go and discover new things, like what happened to all those boats in the Bermuda triangle, or where Atlantis was, if it was anywhere, but sometimes the significant stuff is sitting right under your nose.

Anyway, you may have guessed that I stumbled across something recently - something unsettling and weird, something unexpected. The sort of discovery that troubles your waking mind long after the sneezing fit caused by inhaling the dust you scrapped off of the item has passed. Actually, now that I think about it, the whole thing sort of started out like a mid-eighties, low-grade horror movie.

Actually, now that I think about it, the whole thing sort of started out like a mid-eighties, low-grade horror movie.

You see, last summer I went on an expedition of sorts, an archaeological dig to unearth the last known remains of my university life. I excavated my old storage locker and, in the grand fashion of slow-brewing horror movies, shipped all of the artifacts home and stored them in the dry-dusty depths of my basement and forgot about them. For a while.

Eventually though, something always calls out to me from the poorly lit corners of my world, usually the basement, and I had to seek out those artifacts, crowbar in hand to pry open the mysterious crates in a fit of insomnia-based productivity. And so I opened up my old file cabinet and found something wholly unexpected waiting for me there.

I found that I had the same file folders in university that I do now, almost ten years later. The exact same categories.

Ok, I'll admit that this isn't quite the same as finding a live Sasquatch in a crate, or a dinner plate possessed by demons. This is really the point where the production becomes more of a psychological thriller, full of disturbing suggestions and subtle hints of things structurally unsound. A desperate segment of film where the protagonist races about with increasing velocity, seeking to defend his previously satisfactory life from a creeping background fear, slowly building to a fever pitched crescendo, that he is as stagnant as a prairie swamp.

This is the fear that gripped me, although anyone who watched me open the file cabinet would probably just have assumed that I'd discovered African flying spiders or something, in there. But this was worse than flying spiders.