Organized? Never.

Once in a while, at greatly irregular intervals, and brandishing the samefearful resolve I face the dentist with, I actually start to get “organized.”

In this case, the task at hand is to neatly compile the stuff I’vepublished. A good bit of that material is the columns I’ve been scratchingout for this fine newspaper. The weeks go by, the months do, too,eventually entire years slide by, and it’s hard to believe the Tribune andI joined forces–egads!–way back in 1997.

Writing has a way of sneaking up on you. I’ve got 10 years worth of it to account for; some fruitful years, some relatively quiet ones, but they all snowball into a giant mess that
I’ve yet to figure out how to administrate.

I’ve got magazines scattered around with tattered pages ripped out of them, yellowed newspaper clippings that look like they came from Babylonian times, and, basically, a veritable rat’s nest that makes well-organized people wince at the first sight.

The lesson I am supposed to learn is that keeping such things well organized is an essential piece of daily business. My retort is that when you’re busy producing stuff, you’re too busy to account for it. Cool and rational minds would point out that it’s necessary to do both, but cool and rational minds are never much fun to listen to. Give me an impassioned and rational mind for company any day…and, please, spare me the impassioned and irrational minds that seem to be as ubiquitous as coconut trees.

And for all I know, I’ve got a coconut plantation growing in my office, which very well may be hiding behind all this paper.
Paper: it’s a curse. So vow number one in my organization crusade is to learn how to use a scanner, to see if I can convert paper gibberish into cyber gibberish. I know I’ll be trading one pain in the neck for another, but sometimes you’re better off with the hell you don’t know than the hell you know. Five Zip disks take up a heck of a lot less room than five bankers boxes do, and they’re easier to duplicate. Or so I want to believe.

Some day, some bright somebody is going to go into business performing these hateful tasks for guys like me. You’ll deliver him a messy box full of papers, and he’ll give you back the same box, along with a zip disk, or maybe a CD, of the information all duly scanned and indexed. This would be a ripe opportunity for some high school computer whiz on summer break. Heck, maybe I’ll open up such a business. There’s no zealot like a convert, eh?

But if the computer age is upon us, why are so many of us still utterly dependent on reams of paper? Computers seem to merely add another layer of complexity to life sometimes. I’m going to be swallowed up by utter chaos, and I have a sinking feeling that any resistence is futile. Some of us are just plain disorganized, and maybe there’s nothing we can do about it but suffer.