Junk: Written by David

You may have noticed that generally these posts tend to follow things that I, your faithful author, happen to be experiencing around the moment they're written. Well if there's one thing being a poet has taught me, it's how to relate one thing to another thing that generally revolves around my life.

This week that happens to be junk. Or more specifically, written junk.

I just spent a good twenty minutes clearing out an E-mail inbox full of junk as I prepare for my future as a substitute teacher, and I needed to clean out my non-university professional inbox. What did I find awaiting me but over 1000 unread E-mails.

Why should you care about my unread E-mails? Who am I, but some mad man sitting on his laptop divulging to you the lax care with which I treat my secondary E-mail account. Well, there is a reason that applies to you, and here it is.

How do you go about storing and cataloging your artistic endeavors? Is everything neatly arranged in its own little nook which you go to every day and clear out before it can pile up and overwhelm you?

If so please leave comments on how to manage such amazing organizational skills because I don't have them. But if you're not one of those royalty of organization, your artistic endeavors may have become a seemingly unmanageable pile of confusion, and you may be wondering how to go about cleaning it out.

First things first, don't be afraid to throw things out. I know what you may be thinking or actively screaming at your monitors. How could anyone throw out art that has come from their own hands, put down for future generations to appreciate and cherish. Or even buy!

Well, here's the thing. If it's sitting on the bottom of a stack of other such masterpieces, is it really all that special? Even if your habit is to stow thing away to let them stew and then return to them at a later date to tweak, how many of those pieces do you actively stew upon and how many do you forget about until you shuffle through your work again?

The first step towards recovery is to admit you have a problem. So if you're like me, you've got several half filled notebooks with half started ideas, hastily scribbled notes, and maybe a finished work or two. It's time to learn how to pluck out the gold and toss out the junk. Hint, if it's more than a year old and you haven't worked on it, it may just be for the garbage. But it ultimately comes down to you whether you want to be a hoarder of ideas just in case one time in the future when you look at it again it inspires you to greatness.

But for every E-mail of gold, there's a hundred facebook notifications waiting to be deleted. See what I did there? And you wondered why I was talking about my E-mails...

David is most certainly not an alien despite what some people may say. When he's not writing blog posts for Obsession, he splits his time between assimilation and overpowering futile resistance.