flashback

I had the interesting pleasure of cleaning out some of my stuff from my parent's place on Sunday. It was a voyage of discovery.

Amongst the findings, were the following:

* A large selection of blank tapes, including the following: 4 Digibetas, 4 DVCPro, 1 DVCProHD, and around 6 miniDVs. Ha! Over budgeting on certain productions I can now save on media for whatever low budget project I do next. Sweet.

* Collected letters from High School and, perhaps, into first year uni. What is interesting with finding old letters is that they're letters written to you and often lack the context you once had. Their evidence of friendships long gone.

* Some old cassette tapes of music projects, including rehearsal tapes of my 3u Music Composition (a string trio), recordings of my high school metal band (Retaxus we called ourselves, yes, after the Rhino), as well as some 'working' tapes from when I was in first year music.

* Collected cards from friends and family for various birthdays a long the way: 18th, 21st, 25th etc. I kept the ones which actually had stuff written in them.

* Lots of weird trinkets that brought back memories of my overseas trips... like the weird pendant I bought in Milan, the Formula 1 badges i was given in LA, jada jada.

* Three A4 note books full of, well, notes. As some more astute readers may remember, I often use notebooks in two ways for writing: (a) disobligation and (b) to sketch out scenes before they get typed up. Diobligation is a process I've adopted from performance rehearsals. To get me into a certain mindset, I'll write stream of conscious before I do anything creative. Sometimes it can be word games, but often it can be highly personal, paranoid scribbles.

I think I've realised I"m a pretty sentimental guy, and I look forward to mining the depths of my own past... I think it'll unlock some stuff... for both good and bad.

I didn't find any of my old poetry, which I'm not sure if I'm sad about. Thinking about my poems, I remember how much of a handwriting guy I was. I almost always wrote my poems by ahnd... often re-writing them out to make additional changes. There could be three or four different hand written versions before a 'final one'. Whenever I wanted to show a person a poem I had written, I'd write it out (again) in a letter. Wow. This was the era when making mix tapes for friends and/or potential girlfriends was still a done thing... How times have changed, eh?