Buried In Paper In An Electronic Age

Buried in Books...
One of the blogs I frequent is written by someone self-described as totally cool and really hip with their American Caesar a wonderful biography of Douglas MacArthur written by William Manchester.  Apparently we're all messed up and driven by our parents obsessions, strengths and weaknesses.
reading of books.  Lacking coolness but good at copying people who are, I am sharing what I'm reading (which also distracts me from writing).

Chairs...
Tananarive Due, a writer of some accomplishment has nine books, eight collaborations and articles and
stories in wordsmith credits.  The first was written in a wooden, straight-back chair at ten years of age.  Forty years later it remains part of the creative process.

My chair has been far less productive in its' place before the keyboard.  As a new office desk chair in 1990 it served well until a corporate 'office move' in 2001.  At that point I simply took it home.  With 26 years in front of my keyboard it has produced nothing of publishing quality, perhaps hundreds of letters, thousands of emails, many attempts at work of interest...and sixteen years of tax returns.  I have annoyed a lot of people.  A few have chuckled.

A broader posterior or small cleaning effort would make it as good as new...but without that there's still a future and duct tape repair is not imminent.

Buried in Small Business...
After six years we're getting some media coverage on the local CBS station.  Like all businesses it's a balance of resources and effort and endless time of being too busy or not busy enough.  The media coverage will change the equation.

Buried in Rental/Tenants/Mediation/Farming...
Years ago I removed myself from the landlord business.  I'm weak and again a landlord.  My labor day was spent mediating a conflict and misunderstanding between the tenant who farms the land and watches his emerging plantings, and the housing tenant who perhaps should have walked across the field to shoot geese rather than drive a pickup.  In elementary school they remind you to keep to your own space.  Good advice.

Buried Septic History...
The farm has a quaint farmhouse which has been rented out continuously.  At the time of purchase a decade ago we were aware of the non-complying septic system.  It a perfect septic world the products flushed end up in a solid tank, the solids settle and the overflow runs off to a drain field where it is purified draining back through the sandy soil.  This septic tank was farmer-made of silo bricks and leaked.  It was a good solution for the day when walking out to the little house was no longer convenient.  As we've conducted our septic archaeology survey it appears that there are three farmer-made tanks serving various effluent production devices and two drain fields.  It's an October project.  Hopefully the next owner will appreciate our investment to relocate what goes downhill.

Digitally Buried...
Certainly we're in a paperless world.  Digital.  Electronic.  People I owe money to don't want my checks or 
credit cards but simply want my bank routing number and account number and they suck the money out.  That's fine.  Writing checks, paper or electronic is tedious and the credit card companies collect fees at unfairly high rates.  Despite all this new form of communication and payment the paper continues to accumulate and my recycling barrel becomes full every two weeks and my keyboard is disappearing (yes, that is probably a 15 year old keyboard.  Somewhere I have newer that match the black of my current desktops (one keyboard, three PCs) but I don't want to trace the cables under the stacks of important papers and I don't want to go to a wireless keyboard (no good reason).

Even the companies give me an option to print out receipts for payments, registrations, purchases, etc.  I'm certain that "print a copy of this for safekeeping" will ultimately bury me or be good tinder (for all those buried cables).