When Sherlock Holmes has to go into the garbage . . .

Going to whine a bit this afternoon, so forgive me.

 Forty-five years of Sherlockian life does lead to a certain level of accumulation.

I'm not talking about collecting here. I'm talking about the bits and pieces that either just came your way or were extras of things you created or just generally had Sherlock's name or picture or was related to something that had Sherlock's name or picture. Now, the following words might bother a few of you, and there may be some denial triggered as well, so take a breath and just hold for a second after I use these words, but I think what I'm talking about here is Sherlockian trash.

I know, I know, "one man's trash is another man's treasure," but sometimes you just shouldn't be held responsible for finding that other man. Only so much time in the world, and sometimes, the trash has to be taken out. Or recycled.

Whilst a lot of society functions in the paperless world of the internet at this point, t'was not always so. Materials were printed, photocopied, mimeographed, or retyped for even the most limited of moments -- a paper presented at scion meeting for eight people that you made fifteen copies of, for example. Not something you throw away immediately, and eventually these pile up. Or those thirty extra copies of the local Sherlockian society newsletter that got printed up in 1992, that, gee, they're old, but are they collectable? Copies were send to the big library archives back in the day, so it's not like they're vanishing off the face of the earth if you dump a few.

And there's a limited amount of this stuff you can pass along to younger Sherlockian friends as novelty items. Or sit out on a giveaway table at a con. And a lot of it doesn't have meaning or significance to anyone from another generation or who wasn't there at the time, and you can't expect it to. They have their own detritus picked up along their path.

As impossible as it may seem to some younger version of ourselves, especially a 1980s incarnation, eventually one has to decide that not everything with a deerstalker and a pipe is a holy relic. And some of it might actually need to go into the trash. We do live in an age of massive storage for digital photos of things, so that might ease the conscience a little bit, as throwing photos on a blog might give the Sherlockian historical record a chance of seeing the thing if it ever needs seen. 

For now, back to cleaning . . .