So much one can live without and should I keep unsubscribing from junk mail and it seems that the simple act of unsubscribing opens the sluiceway to even more junk. I get offers to pay cash for my current home, to consolidate my debt, to save up to 50% on things I don’t want, to get a credit card for people with bad credit, a hair implant, introduce me to other lonely people, and so forth. So I keep clicking and praise God for the Delete key, the invention of which ranks with Gutenberg’s movable type in the annals of human progress, not so much for eliminating junk mail as for eliminating one’s own dim-witted writing. Back in the typewriter age we had erasers and liquid white-out and so-called “Lift-Off Tape” or correctable ribbon, which was okay for fixing a misspelled word, but Delete enables you to remove whole pages of pretentious garbage from your writing such as the passage about the privilege of washing blackboards in Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s fourth-grade classroom at Benson School, which I just deleted here and unless I click on “Undo delete” which I will not do, you need never read it.
The urge to expunge is a powerful thing, admit it. A year ago, my wife and I moved from an enormous house to a 2 BR apartment and disposed of a dumpsterful of memorabilia, most of which we’d forgotten we had, and truckloads of comfy furniture that went to a charity that sets up young folks for housekeeping. I expected it to be painful; it was exhilarating — throwing out all of my college term papers so at last I can forget that young man. Read the rest of the column >>> | 