If you emailed me a month or so ago and haven’t heard back, good luck. I have a backlog of 10,659 email messages sitting in my Apple Mail account and another 8,668 in my Yahoo account. If I had to guess, 95% of all those messages are of no value. The remaining 5% keep me up at night, worrying that I’ve forgotten someone because the way the email rolls in these days, if I don’t take immediate action on a personally relevant message requiring a response, it will disappear from view within an hour, buried under nonsense. At my age, my mind can’t keep up. On good days, I can hold a thought for as long as it takes to walk from one side of the room to the other. Otherwise, forget it. So, if your email came in, let’s say, before Easter, you will have to hope in the power of resurrection along with those of us who do.
Obviously, something needs to be done. I would like to put the responsibility on the purveyors, but what chance is there of any restraint where they’re concerned? I hear from Donald Trump, personally, almost every day. Or his son. Or the Speaker of the House with a message requiring an immediate response. Minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer (he calls me, Jarvis, I call him, Chuck), is always sharing things, confidentially. Both he and Hakeem Jeffries. And it’s always on matters of urgent concern. They don’t know urgent: I’ve got a mountain of downed ash trees that need to be split and stacked before black fly season. And the dog needs to be fed.
My point is, there is no getting rid of the rest of the purveyors if the president et al can have unrestrained access to my inboxes, like it or not. How can I expect support from the government when it is a chief malefactor?
Granted, some of my clutter — maybe a lot — is self-inflicted. I subscribe to a variety of alternative news sources to help prevent the big box media companies from taking over the world. (I recommend Tangle News, The Free Press, The Global Post and Delayed Gratification). So, yes, I’m guilty of leaving the door open to the equivalent of the neighborhood cats. And there they are, every morning when I come out of the bedroom, sprawled across the sofas, stretched out on the kitchen floor, purring sweetly, awaiting my attention. My meager subscription fees result in an astonishing amount of information that sloshes into my inbox. I can’t keep up.
Time for a purge. Time for spring cleaning. Except I know it will all come back.
Years ago, a friend moved to Atlanta for work. He told the story of colleague hunched over his computer, seemingly intent on some laborious task.
“I’m trying to get rid of all these grits,” his colleague explained, when my friend asked what he was doing.
“Grits?”
“You’ll figure out soon enough that when you order breakfast around here you get grits. Even if you don’t order them, grits just come. Same with email. Email just comes.”
There are definitely things I want to read piled-up in my computer inbox. My wife will tell you I have a similar pile of magazines. I would like to read them all, too. My habits are bad, I guess. My routine needs adjusting. My eyes are bigger than my stomach. How do people have time for social media under these circumstances? I don’t know.
I’m going down to the pond to say hello the loons who appeared this afternoon. Can the blossoms be far behind?
Jarvis Coffin writes fiction and essays on rural life. He is a retired media and advertising sales executive and former chef/owner, with his wife, of New Hampshire’s oldest inn, the Hancock Inn. Reach him at huntspond@icloud.com, and keep up with all his musings at jarviscoffin.com.