I should get rid of my old CDs. There is no real reason to keep them. Maybe a few of the local bands who never made it big that signed copies would be an exception, but I have kept them all, along with every program from every play that I have ever seen. There is no real sense to this. I have seen a lot of plays. I have to make a concerted effort to not save stubs from movie tickets, although I do find them piling up in places.
Long ago I wrote (luckily I don’t save everything that I have ever written, but I did save this):
I first encountered the word ‘mathom’ twenty-one years ago when I was reading The Lord of the Rings. Hobbits, like both Dragons and New Yorkers, are natural hoarders. And, when a healthy amount of material possessions becomes burdensome, some of the more interesting things are sent to a museum run by the Mayor: “The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms….” I later found out that ‘mathom’ meant ‘treasure’ in Old English. And, indeed in Beowulf, the dragon’s hoard is filled with many a maðþum.
It was an introduction to an old blog. I thought at the time that the mathoms I kept were only in my mind, but, it turns out that when I moved a few months later I had more than I realized in boxes.
I make no pretense that the mathoms I put here will be worthy for a dragon’s hoard, merely that they will be worthy of your consideration. I only hope, that by writing them down, I can be done with these pesky notions so that they stop cluttering my mind and clutter yours instead.
I didn’t mean it at the time but I think that this notion sums up all writing, or at least all of the writing that I do. The ideas need to be let out one way or another, and they have to be let out properly.
I told an idea to a friend years ago for a story I wanted to write and he told me it was cliché, and there was no more damning word to me then than ‘cliché.’ I would even have preferred ‘bad.’ I can’t recall exactly what the idea was but I doubt it was cliché, or even bad. I do know that I went about it in the wrong manner. Nobody wants to hear story ideas, although a few may want to read them once they are finished.
I can’t speak for anyone else but for me the ideas have to come out or they become distracting.
Thomas Olivieri 