Piling Through

Behind iMac to the right, a rarely touched region of the desk: A user's guide to Cheap Imposter, a shareware page impositor. An imposed test printout of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (excerpts). A December 2004 Verizon Home voice Mail and Call Waiting guidebook. A ruled yellow notepad with a list of Penguin book titles, from which five items have been checked off for desk copy requests (authors making the final cut were Goethe, Henry Green, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, and Stendhal). An old journalism notepad with contact info preserved (e.g. a vintage instrument shop in center city Philadelphia). A Shambhala Publications faxback form with three titles requested: the Gnostic bible, Surrealist games, and Emerson's Nature and other writings. A two page printout of names and email addresses from my amiga emulator yam program's addressbook. Important payroll information for a college I work at (unidentified, two years old). Two sheets of paper containing local library hours and phone numbers. A one page list of songs I've written. Story idea scrawled on a Softmart notepad sheet with the tag line at top "Get Connected with OS/2 Warp Connect!" The story idea is about a happily married man who is informed by a midget that his wife is having an affair, and instead of murdering his wife (which he considers carefully), decides to bear the information quietly and derive corrupt pleasure from his knowing something about her that she doesn't know he knows. A name change notification from my auto finance company. A list of usernames and passwords. A three page emacs cribsheet. More usernames and passwords, three pages worth. An ink and crayon sketch of my dog Lucy. Three more pages of domain name information filled with tuples. An early drawing by my daughter entitled: "A|is|THELADR|OV THE WEEK! It is a picture of a yellow wagon filled with red apples. The wagon is being pulled by a smiling child with large hands standing on a brown ball, from which extends an elongated neck and head with antennae topped by green globes. A four page Unix commands cribsheet. More email addresses. A list of potential entity names for an xml dtd. A slim notebook of creative writing drafts from 1996-97. A spiral notebook with a bright orange cover. A folder filled with draft material for my novel in progress. A folder of contact info for book publishers. A printout of autoreply rejection slips to make it easier for editors to reject my work. A sparsely filled ideas folder. A folder labelled "current drafts". An Allmusic.com freelancers folder. A folder lablled Fiction, containing old short stories. Another fiction folder, on the front of which is a drawing in blue pen of a noble reindeer. In the background Santa Claus, wearing shades, is flying away in his sled. A voice bubble exclaims: "Bye bye, suckkerr...ha ha ho!" A stoic fullmoon observes from above. An old folder dubbed "Prose" with mostly handwritten sheets.