Hypergraphia

Hypergraphia is an overwhelming urge to write. It is not itself a disorder, but can be associated with temporal lobe changes in epilepsy and mania in the context of bipolar disorder. -- Wikipedia

I'm tempted to succumb to it. It seems there are few things I'd rather do. Of course it would consist mainly of noodling about inside my own brain. Given an opportunity to succumb and use up so much time, I would surely direct myself to be productive, as the allegedly hypergraphic Fyodor Dostoevsky and Lewis Carroll managed to do. Surely I would. Surely.

I knew a lady who considered herself hypergraphic. She was also bipolar. She was an amazing writer. Some of her turns of phrase, even in random emails, were almost heartbreaking in their perfection. Sometimes she dropped into French. She was not a happy person, being in a constant struggle with her own brain. She was a good friend. And then she dropped out of sight, as she said she would one day do. Killed all email accounts etc. To track her down I would have to go to her house and knock. And I could do that. But that would be rather presumptive, if not invasive. (It is in another city, and I only went there once.)

Yesterday's post came about because I felt like writing about the weird and dangerous experience of answering the phone while driving my old Jeep. I agree I shouldn't do that. But my (ex) wife has a special ring and I tend to answer it. So I did, in after-dark rush hour traffic coming up Sunrise Boulevard where it winds up from the river, surrounded by office workers hurtling home and delivery vans hurrying to make their last stops. A smoke alarm was chirping, one of those on the thirteen foot ceiling she can't reach. I offered to go take care of it right then, even while holding the wheel with my knee and reaching across to shift with my left hand. I thought it was amusing and so wrote about it. I would write about everything if I could.

Yeah, pretty much everything.

So this morning I was going to write about the cassette tape conundrum but when I recognized what a trivial subject that was I started thinking about why I wanted to write about it. I started writing about why I wanted to write about it, actually. Writing is a common substitute for thinking in my world. And so I thought about hypergraphia and decided to write about that. And the friend that I've lost, hopefully not permanently. And the tapes.

See, it's a large house and it's full of stuff and the stuff that isn't hers or our sons' does not, in her estimation, need to be there. I cannot disagree. So every time I stop by, I leave with more stuff. This time it was three shoeboxes full of cassette tapes. They need dumping at a recycling center. They also need preservation, in some weird way, because they not only preserve in music a long stretch of years but a lot of hours and care making tapes. Back in that long twenty plus year stretch between putting my first stereo in my first car in 1978 and the day it was easy and commonplace to burn CDs, a lot of tapes were made. Not only by me but by friends. Copies and compilations. Even though they're probably warbly from years spent in the garage's summer heat and winter cold, they have an irreplaceable quality, like old cuddle toys. I can't see dumping them. I can't see playing them -- would have to make room for my old tape player and then use it. I can't see digitizing them, as I plan to do with some part of my father's five linear feet of record albums, because of the quality factor. I don't know WHAT do do with them.

Dump 'em. With great apologies to they who made me so many great tapes that will likely never get played again. Maybe I could set up to digitize just those. That's a thought. Or if not a thought, it's words written, anyway. A few words written out of the many thousands that will not get written today.