The other night as I was clearing some of my old stuff out of my mom’s house, I acknowledged something that had been bothering me for years. Strewn about in random piles were unlabeled, un-albumed photographs.

I figured it was about time to take care of this little annoyance so I gathered all of them up along with the random negatives and put them in a basket.

Tonight I actually started the task of going through them.

And it was kinda fun.

Sometimes I would find one photo that had a date on it and I would be able to identify the rest from the series by what people were wearing, what decor was in the background, and even by the type of photo paper they were printed on. Sometimes the negatives were in the little packets and still in the sleeve of the pouch you drop your film in to. Luckily, some of those sleeves had dates. So I would hold up the negatives to the light to id the pictures and then put an estimated year on it.

I got through 7/8ths of them, I’d guess. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures.

I think maybe making it a game like that sort of offset the sadness of seeing so many photographs of my life but not being able to remember the moments.

My memory was severely affected by the accident nearly 5 years ago. Shit. It’s nearly been five years since my whole world changed, since my world became so much smaller.

I fear I’m about to travel down the path of thoughts that I don’t particularly want to be thinking about at 11:30 at night when I have to work tomorrow. I’ll make some notes though and come back to it another time. Maybe.

On a brighter note (that I’m forcing myself to find so I don’t depress myself completely before bed), I did find some fantastic pictures of me and several of my friends from ages ago. I’m pretty sure some of them will find their way to the scanner. And maybe on to the blog.