Buried Treasure
Season 9, #1: That hole in your existential pocket? Let's do some Daytalking about it
“And now, Jim, we’re to go in for this here treasure hunting, with sealed orders too, and I don’t like it; and you and me must stick close, back to back like, and we’ll save our necks in spite o’ fate and fortune.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
MY OLD PAPER MONSTER’S Ozempic regimen seems to be finally kicking in.
The first step was snaring the OPM out of the basement (I called a junk removal service—set me back $400 but man it was gone in a snap) but knew that what remained after chucking solid stuff was “merely” paper—if you know me, you know I know there’s gold in them thar hills.
So what the hell am I talking about?
THIS—
I can’t know what’s actually IN the Paper Monster until I handle ALL of the Paper Monster. That’s the task I’ve been dreading, maybe all my life.
It would be fun to have a friend go through it with me, but I’m afraid it’s a solo job. And it seems to have a seasonal vibe attached to it (you know, “Oh, I’ll do that in the winter when it’s cold and bitter outside!” or “The summer’s too nice to sit inside sorting through crappy old papers! Let’s do it next weekend.”).
Then the pile of papers becomes the OLD PAPER MONSTER (OPM™).
Hey, you meet a writer, you get paper. And lots of it, unfortunately.
But it’s more than that.
There are old videotapes, various media on old drives, Super 8 film reels, photos, just interesting stuff, man. Each item will need lil’ ol’ me to be its judge, jury, and executioner: RECYCLE, KEEP (and reorganize), or TRASH.
Just this morning, Saturday, June 21 (the first full day of summer 2025!), I started picking up bulges from the piles, flabby ol’ fatty tissue, Christmas cards from years past, letters, obituaries, thank you notes, postcards, family trinkets shared via the USPS, and you know what…?
Buried treasures are in there. Even about things I previously wrote about here on Substack! Nothing, it seems, ever goes away entirely.
Here’s an example.
Back in January ’24 I wrote this piece about a Minnesota bookseller who used to send handwritten newsletters to his book buyer list.
You Need These Books More Than I Do
IT WAS PROBABLY IN the 1980s—1985 or early ’86 for sure—just after I’d started at my first corporate job, moving out of my parents’ farmhouse in the country, and finishing Round 3 of college (University of Iowa, sans sheepskin), when I received the first “Open House” newsletter from a bookseller named Melvin McCosh.
Buried in the pile were at least a dozen more newsletters I didn’t use in the first post, leading me to think there might be room for a sequel. What’s the angle? I’ll have to spend time with them to see (which is a main component of what I call “Daytalking”—more of an attitude and a “being with” than anything involving daylight or spoken words. It’s a cheery, uplifting, good thing to hold in your heart.).
Some of the old stuff has found its way into the closet, but will need to emerge again when I have the energy for it: mostly family photos to sort through. Many are disposable (bad composition, a photo of a tree or a goddamn cloud someone took one time, etc.) and I know there will be duplicate photos, too.
I’m trying to take a Daytalking approach, even though June 2025 greeted me with a distinctly Nightwalking attitude. That is to say, it was a dark and moody start to the summer—not a feeling I recall when I was younger.
Today is different and I awoke, ate breakfast, made coffee and grabbed a handful from the OPM, knowing the easily recognizable stuff would end up in a box designated for it, or in the recycle and shred pile.
It’s a task that’s stop-and-go. No easy way ’round that.
But the hands-on approach is vital. I’m sure I’ll find material for future posts, and some writing or artwork that will connect in some creative way to share on StoryShed. That’s where the buried treasure idea comes from.
Last year I organized the diaries and journals and miraculously got them all into one black plastic box to protect them from solar radiation—hopefully adding to their longevity.
But where will they go when I die?
Too early to say, but likely they’ll go to my brother’s sons, in some form.
At one time I wondered if I could find an academic library that would take them, or I could establish a foundation so they get placed somewhere, but I still dip into them occasionally to research and explore my past.
Have you ever had to sort through your own OLD PAPER MONSTER or something similar in your family?
How did it go?
Did you discover new solutions you can share?
SEASON NINE OF DAYTALKING will be fun, and less of a heavy reading lift than Season 8 was, but maybe that worked for some subscribers. I thoroughly enjoyed finally writing about 2022’s Supernatural America exhibition, and Substack was the perfect place to showcase it.
There are future long-form seasons in the works: one being an immersive course I wanted to experiment with before the pandemic, the other a social media year-long event that happened twice on Twitter back in the early aughts, with a cohort reading all the plays of William Shakespeare in the order they were written, called Willtality. That may resurface that here on Substack, and would work better as a wintertime project since it’s a lot of reading and conversation back-and-forth as the cohort digs into each Shakespeare play.
Lastly, I found a fun essay buried in the belly of the OPM (one of the treasures of handling each piece of paper) written by Keith Ridgway in The New Yorker in August of 2012 titled Everything Is Fiction. Ridgway was a fiction writer who sometimes had to “explain” his process in interviews and media events.
I reread his essay and found this worth sharing:
—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.
What do you think?
Mike, you’ve inspired me (maybe!) to resume work on the Augean stables, the mess of disorderly papers, newspaper clippings (by me) and other stuff in my hazardous attic office. This has hampered productivity all my life. I’m somewhat homebound these days both from the heat and an unexpected ailment that makes me even more slothful. Books worth of material that remained unwritten because of my mess, interview transcripts with people I’d forgotten I’d spoken to that, I hope, will keep my own Substack more vital. Let’s get’er done!
Oh boy, clutter clearing is a favorite topic ever since I read Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston and went to her workshop. She has an entire chapter on how to deal with paper, books, photos, and sentimental stuff. I highly recommend it.
I just went through two box files of paper records last week and got rid of a pile more than a foot high. Over time I've whittled photos down to five small albums arranged by time and memoribilia to one plastic storage container. And don't you know that I rarely look at the photos or memoribilia!!!
The overall benefit is that, even if it's sitting somewhere, this stuff weighs you down because it represents a Commitment, and I can attest that getting rid of stuff lightens your emotional and psychic load. This stuff also takes up space that could be used for other things.
The question is how much of what you've collected will you ever actually look at or use, and who's going to want to look at it when you die. When I've gone through my stuff, most of it would be of zero interest to anyone else and they'd puzzle over why it saved it. They're also not going to go through it because they have their own piles of stuff to deal with.
Once you get rid of stuff, it's amazing how clear and free you feel. Literally. Like an emotional load has been removed from your life and your shoulders. So I'm a big advocate for going through it fast and being ruthless. Unless it's something you cherish, toss it, move on, and focus on creating new memories and pursuing new topics.