Information has a shelf life.....

[poltr1]

While some of my friends were down south, partyin' at GaFilk, I tackled one of my decluttering projects: the baseball card box of business cards. Some of them were (relatively) easy to get rid of -- places in Buffalo I haven't been to in 20 years, local restaurants and businesses that have since closed, places I probably wouldn't ever visit again. And some were hard to get rid of -- the contacts I made at cons and RGs years ago.

I felt that if I was throwing a person's business card away, it was like throwing that person away. Part of the reason I held onto these cards for so long is that I was afraid of forgetting all about a person if I had no memento of them.

And then there were the card I had of Rob, one of my fraternity brothers. He was a computer geek like me, so we sort of clicked. He had his own computer company, Datamerica Systems. He died in a motorcycle accident in either 2000 or 2001. The last card I had of his showed he worked in Tower 2 of the World Trade Center. If he hadn't been killed in the motorcycle accident, he probably would have been killed on 9/11.

I still have more cards to go, but I hope to get that done this week.