The Dangers of Keeping Track

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There they were, like letters mailed to myself from the distant past, lost for years and then suddenly arriving at the worst time to shatter my worldview, a set of file folders with almost identical titles to my current set. Car. Credit Cards. Home. Taxes. Insurance. Career (yes, I had a career file before I even got out of university - I'm aware that that's sort of scary all on its own). Utilities. Miscellaneous Receipts. School. Well, ok I didn't have that last one anymore, but it wasn't that long ago that I'd finally closed that one off, after the student loans were cleared away.

This brought about the sort of epiphany that only ever arrives in the middle of the night while you're sitting on your basement floor wishing you could sleep because you have to work in the morning, but for some unreachable reason, like ghostly hands that touch you from behind but are never there when you spin around, you just cannot sleep. So the epiphany arrived and I became unsettled. Which is fine, because sometimes unsettled is what you want, really.

I'm sitting there, unsettled, in a basement lit by bare light bulbs, realising that for all the enormous changes that I thought my life had passed through since school, it still all fit into the same nice little categories that it used to. The folders were all the same, only the contents had changed. The "Home" folder now contained info on property taxes and mortgage payments, instead of damage deposit and rent receipts. The car folder contained maintenance history records and receipts for repairs, only now the repairs were minor and done by my dealership, as opposed to catastrophic failure repairs done by dubious mom & pop garages in rusty-edged industrial neighbourhoods. It turned out that I paid more taxes now, but I was still filling out the same forms every year.

None of this was going to help me get to sleep anytime soon. Insomnia is the body's way of telling you that you're too busy to sleep.

For the next week or two I obsessed, a little. I went about my day-to-day life, but eating away at the back of my mind was this virulent doubt, this worry that I was fooling myself and nothing in my life had really changed in years. It made me want to quit my job and run off on a multi-national bender/journey of hazy self-discovery. It made me want to travel with strangers, argue with twitchy-eyed philosophers under tireless moons and bury myself alive in unintelligible foreign cultures, preferably violently unstable ones. It made me wonder what it was like to take Acid.

It made me want to travel with strangers, argue with twitchy-eyed philosophers under tireless moons and bury myself alive in unintelligible foreign cultures, preferably violently unstable ones.

It occurred to me that this might be a mid-life crisis, although it seemed awfully early for one to have arrived.

It also made it tough for me to sleep, which wound up being important. Important because guys who can't sleep go digging around in their cool-floored basements, searching for unspecified artifacts that their subconscious mind thinks might be important. Or searching for power tools because if you can't sleep why should anyone else? Anyway, this led me back to my old file folders and another seismic discovery.

The discovery was that my Miscellaneous Receipts folder was the key, that the contents of it had changed as well, but in a very different way. Where the other categories remained static, basically capturing the same old info at a different stage on the lifecycle curve, the miscellaneous receipts folder, that unbounded and unorganised collector that skims the debris off the surface of the lake, held something else.

It was in that folder, its parameters so violently undefined as to be less a method of organisation and more a storage box for stacking under the basement stairs, that the evidence of change was lurking. It was there that the differences between my pre and post university life suddenly came to glaring light. The receipts for rented moving vans, gym memberships, leather jackets, statements of summer employment and boarding pass stubs for flights to Northern BC had changed into something else entirely. Had morphed into receipts for ice axes, literary magazine subscriptions, plane tickets to near-imaginary countries, receipts for furniture. Receipts for guitar lessons and sailing courses, receipts for scuba-diving courses, climbing lectures and university night classes. Ticket stubs for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and for Ozzy Ozbourne concerts, receipts for snowboards and for paintings by people no one has ever heard of.

And so, in the relieving light of this tangible evidence of change, of a life not spent doing the same things over and over, I came to a small realisation: that most of us probably keep the same set of file folders for most of our lives, because society requires us to conform to a certain set of rules so that we can all get along without killing each other. We have to keep our receipts and prove that we are towing the line in the basic areas, but we are free to fill the rest of the time and space with whatever lunacy we so desire. The lunacy tends not to get tracked as well as the other stuff, because no one ever checks your receipts on it, but it's the stuff that counts. It's what we're really here to do - paying the bills so that you can have food, shelter and transportation is important, but it's just the pre-requisites that you have to complete so you can get to the important things. Pay the bills and then ignore that stuff - keep your eye on the miscellaneous folder.