Dan's Papers - May 30, 2008 - Everything I Throw Out I Need The Next Day

Yesterday, my fiancée Chris opened the top drawer of the little side table in our kitchen, pulled out two Zagat restaurant guides for Long Island, noted that one of them said 2007 and the other said 2008 and chucked the 2007 one in the trash.

I ran to the trash and pulled it out and put it back in the drawer.

"What did you do that for?" she asked.

I hesitated only for a minute. "I may want to remember some of the meals I ate at restaurants that closed last year," I said.

So this is my problem. I never throw anything away. Ever. And the reason is - for example, in this case with the Zagats - there really is no "may" about my wanting to remember some closed restaurant. There is only I "will" want to remember some closed restaurant.

It's connected up. How it works is - oh this is so sick - if I throw something away, within days, or maybe at the most weeks, I will come upon an occasion when I need it. But if I don't throw it away, I will NEVER need it. Keeping it GUARANTEES I will never need it.

Happened just the other day. I was getting flu symptoms: swollen glands, stuffed nose, a slight fever.

"Don't we have a half empty bottle of antibiotics upstairs in the medicine cabinet?" she asked. "I just saw it there."

This is so terrible. That very morning, I had come upon these Cipro capsules in the medicine cabinet where they always were - ever since that time three years ago when some doctor had prescribed them for somebody in the house who, subsequently, never finished them.

Surely it's safe to throw them out, is what went through my mind. I'm sure they're expired. But then I reminded myself that if I threw them out, as usual, I would absolutely need them again soon. Then I thought, as I always did, that this is so ridiculous. And so, I unscrewed the top and dumped the capsules down the toilet.

There is no escaping this. And I've told people about this problem I have, and they say I should go see a shrink.

Well, there are pluses and there are minuses. I still have everything, or almost everything (except for the few things I threw out, dammit, and sorely needed again) and that's a plus. On the minus side, though, is that all around the house I have to have drawers, cabinets, files and shelves where I keep the "everything."

Maybe this problem of mine has to do with wanting to do the same thing over and over and over again. Or it's caused me to want to do everything over and over again. I've been running the Dan's Papers Kite Fly for 30 years. I've been running the Dan's Papers Potatohampton mini-thon for 29 years. I've been doing Dan's Papers itself for 48 years.

What happens if I give any of this up? I dread to think about it.

Occasionally, I come upon somebody who has this exact same problem. My favorite somebody who has this exact same problem is dead. And his stuff goes on. I think it's wonderful.

This person is Antonio Nunez Jimenez, one of the three Cuban Revolutionaries who overthrew the Batista government in 1959. The other two were Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. (Raoul Castro at the time wanted no part of it. He just wanted to be a farmer.)

I got to see Nunez's stuff in 2000 when, along with Luly Duke, Janice Chase and about ten other people, I went on a cultural exchange trip to Havana for ten days. It's harder now. It was hard then, but if you got permission you could do it, and Luly did and the rest of us tagged along.

On the outskirts of Havana is the home of Nunez, the revered revolutionary. He was ten years older than both Che and Fidel so he was sort of the brains of the operation. He died around 1980 full of honors and accolades. And so after he died they turned his home into a museum.

This guy had the same problem. Everything he ever did or read or bought or was given he kept. And today it is all carefully catalogued and on display in glass cases, on shelves, in drawers and in cabinets.

For example, he saved all the identity tags he was given at all the conventions he ever went to. He'd go into a hall, for example, for a Communist rally somewhere, and a receptionist would pin a tag with his name on it on his shirt. And that night he'd take it off and put it in a drawer. He had hundreds of these things.

He also was a golfer. He saved his golf balls. He saved his pencils and tees and scorecards. I looked over one scorecard he saved from a round of golf he played at the IBM Golf Course at Alamar, just outside of Havana, on March 16, 1959. There was a foursome. A VP from IBM shot a 96. Fidel, who had never played the game before, shot a 172. Che shot a 109. And Nunez shot a 121.

Nunez led a safari of people who paddled canoes down the Amazon in Brazil one winter. The canoe was on display in his dining room. The camera he took pictures with was in the canoe. So was his jacket, his hat and the map, all thumbed and marked up, that he carried in his pocket to show the way.

I have to tell you, I was mightily impressed with Nunez, dead as he is. He saved everything. And the people of Cuba now go into his house and look at his everything. What a guy.

I got a call a few months ago from the Stony Brook University Library in Stony Brook. They want to save my papers after I die. Apparently, they think I've had an interesting life.

Part of the deal is, however, that if I give them my papers, which I do by signing on the dotted line, then THEY own what I give them, and, dead as I am, I no longer have control of whether they keep them or not. THEY can throw them out.

This was a very interesting situation. On the one hand, it was so flattering to my ego that they want me to give them my stuff. On the other hand, my stuff might get thrown away.

I wrestled with all of this, and after a few days of thought, ego won. I signed the dotted line. Get those moving vans ready. Stony Brook has no idea what they will be getting when I die.

But the question lingers. I'm dead. They throw something away. Then what happens?