Impressions ’85

I recently got a new scanner. It’s an older-model Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M, and since then, I’ve been a scanning fool.

Perhaps I’m a bit more nostalgic than most, but I’ve been carrying around boxes of paper memories for the last twenty years. It begins mostly with high school — letters, photos, cards, awards, notes — and really picks up in college. I’ve saved everything I’ve ever written, it seems. And why not? I paid a lot of money for my education, and I’ve invested decades of my life getting to where I am now. (Where is that, exactly?) Even post-college, I have drawers of receipts, tax documents, letters, articles, and whatnot that are better off being bits than they are atoms. Atoms, after all, have mass; collect enough of them, and they’re heavy and take up plenty of space. I’m tired of clutter. I’m a digital man, anyway.

The ScanSnap is very fast, and it scans both sides of a document. I have not been able to get it to integrate with Acrobat 9, as advertised, but that really hasn’t slowed me down. It scans whatever I feed it into a PDF file. If I need to — and you know I do — I can bring it into Acrobat for a bit of OCR. Simple, and with the new computer, quite fast.

I have been scanning everything. I started with the filing cabinet and managed to get rid of all of this crap that I don’t want to ditch — like tax stuff, contracts, house closing stuff, and other official-looking things that you know I’d need if I ever just threw them away. This way, they’re digital, and I’ve eliminated a bit of the kipple. After the drawer, I took the scanner into the office for a few days. Here, I only managed to make a dent, but a significant one. Since graduate school, I’ve had notebooks, file folders, and crates full of research, writing, and course notes that represent my years of graduate education. Into the scanner it all went. (OK, not all. All will take a little more time.) I managed to make a pretty big dent in the office paper. I must admit, however, most of it I’m still reluctant to shred. Oh, the home stuff I scanned first went right into the industrial paper shredder in the office, but my course notes… That might take some time. Even if I don’t end up shredding them, at least I have a digital backup of everything.

I brought the scanner back home for the weekend. I’ve since gotten out the Nostalgia Box. Oh, high school. Seems like a lifetime ago. Do you remember how important everything was then? What a great fantasy world for an analog kid. I was able to relive some of it as I digitized a time in my life pre-computer. Oh, there were computers, but I was concerned about other things, much of which I kept in the form of notes, cards, photos, concert tickets, and other portable memories.

For example, here is Bayshore High School’s last edition of Expressions, published in 1985.

Impressions 85

If you look on page iii, you will see that I won third place for my short story “The Alien.” Yes, it’s true. If you can tell me what famous author I totally ripped off, then I’ll give you a prize. Interestingly enough, looking at the prose I wrote in high school, you’d think I’d be more interested in horror today than science fiction.

OK, back to my summer project. Who knows what else I’ll find.