Memory issues

Every now and then I go through my email account and I delete junk. Lately I have been getting a lot of weird pharmaceutical junk emails, which are easy to delete. Over the past few years I had to keep a group of emails for legal reasons. I lived under the cloud that I could be sued for something and I just thought it would be wise to keep documentation on when and how things went south.

Those I kept. I keep the emails from my ex-wife. I used to make a point of keeping them because I thought at some point I would be sued for custody, and I thought they would come in handy.

Today I was just focusing on cleaning out my email and I came across some very sweet emails that I could not decide what to do with. It's kind of interesting, because I found a series of emails praising me on my creative abilities and I kept thinking, why do I need to keep these? It's not as if I need ego polishing, so they went. I also found some emails from an ex who started out as such a sweetheart and then over time because something a little more difficult to define. They disappeared.

Then there were the emails from friends and people who used to be friends. Many of these were in the form of touching base, checking up on things or offering a recipe of something. They all disappeared today.

Here is a feature I think I really like. I did a search for people who I don't particularly like, all their email would immediately show up and I could mass delete them. No pouring over them for hints of past glory, no checking to see if promises made were promises kept. All gone.

Anyone who knows me realizes that my memory is not nearly the gift it once was. In fact, even important moments tend to disappear in a mist of confusion and bad connections. I do not bring this up as a way of garnering sympathy, more as a way of looking at things. See, with those emails gone, for me, they are really gone. A friend recently got in touch with me and asked how everything in my life was, and at the time I was ecstatic about how things were going. He asked how the kids were, I told him they were swell. The job? Fine. Am I still getting married? I paused, no, I said, I don't think so. He asked what happened, and I was honest, I don't remember.

For that answer alone, the bike accident, the drugs, the testing and treatments, the biopsy, the MRI's and the days of having drugs injected into me - all of it worth it.

Now, stop reading and get your email account open and clean it up.