Have you noticed as you get older that things start to get lost
in the daily attempt to keep all the bits and pieces of your life
together?
Have you noticed as you get older that things start to get lost in the daily attempt to keep all the bits and pieces of your life together? Boy, I sure do; it seems like every time I turn around I left something back where I turned from, and when I turn around again to retrieve it, it’s gone. Of course, with advancing age, time itself becomes a bit fluid, so “every time I turn around” can include periods ranging from seconds to weeks. Nonetheless, it seems my life is becoming a series of events in which I alternate between unexpectedly losing stuff and unexpectedly finding stuff I lost earlier, usually after it’s too late to do anything with it.
So I can certainly sympathize with the Bush administration, which at the moment is simultaneously unable to find Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, Uday Hussein, Qusay Hussein, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, a response to North Korea, or a credible domestic policy, and that’s only what we know about. It boggles the mind to think of what else they might have misplaced that they’re not telling us.
But like I say, these things happen to all of us; nonetheless, it’s our responsibility to compensate for our inevitable occasional brain-belch. I mean, just going around unable to find stuff that’s really important is no way to subjugate a planet. It really detracts from the efforts of the President’s PR people who work so hard to make our wars look good when it keeps turning out that we can’t find the losers, or as in the case of Iraq, the reason given to the world for fighting.
Myself, I learned long ago how to deal with the problem, and in this I know I’m not alone. In fact, I truly believe that someday anthropologists will come to accept that the beginning of civilization was not the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3200 B.C.; it was 3M’s invention of post-it notes in the late 20th Century.
My world is festooned with post-its. At any given time I might have four on my dashboard, three on my bathroom counter, six on my desk blotter, and one or two on my forehead, cleverly written backward so I can read them when I look in a mirror. It is amazing to me that something so simple as a square of paper with a tacky surface on the back can replace almost all the voluntary functions of the human brain, but it’s true. Instead of having to remember a thousand things every day, now I just have to remember one thing: Write a post-it. Well, actually I also have to remember to read my notes, but I have a note for that: It says, “read the other post-its.”
And no doubt due to this administration’s lack of post-it savvy, it failed to include in the White House budget a line item: “one jillion post-its, in various colors and sizes, with Presidential seal, and a pen.” Consequently, it keeps losing things that ought not to be lost when a simple sticky-note – “make sure you can prove Saddam has weapons before you tell everybody he has them” – would have prevented the problem.
So my fellow patriotic, self-sacrificing, pay-any-price, bear-any-burden Americans, I urge you to go to your nearest stationery store and buy as many post-its as you can afford – feel free to use your new tax refund; for most of you it’s about all it will buy – and send them to our President. Send some to the Secretary of State and to the Secretary of Defense, and include a note telling them how you understand that if the price of freedom is eternally having a desk blotter bristling with little yellow scraps of paper, so be it. If it helps them to find stuff, even just one dictator or a single building full of missiles, it will be well worth it.
