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 . . .

What To Say.

 So, I have this blog.

I've had a blog for twenty-two years now. Ten of those years were on a website that no longer exists, where I'd post weekly, on Sunday nights. After that came this version, where posts came at the pace of things to write. Daily for events, weekly if I could manage, and otherwise, randomly as the spirit moved.

 The spirit doesn't seem to be moving me as much lately, for several reasons. First, especially when it comes to the aforementioned Sunday nights, is that I somehow wandered into other outlets, and now put out a weekly podcast, a monthly chronology newsletter, host a monthly Zoom, and, oh, yes, there's that other podcast hanging out there that I haven't ever quite figured out what to do with. Sometimes, you just get ideas for stuff that hold on to you like a curse. And that's just on the Sherlockian side. I won't get into the things my job has been putting me through of late.

Okay, okay, let's not worry that this is one of those "I have to leave" statements we see so often on social media and the like. This isn't that.

This is me just wondering what to write. Like I said, other things competing for time, but at the same time, something has changed. The internet has changed, to be sure. The algorithms have taken the reliability of anything you write being seen away, unless you pay to play. And we live in an age where we are overrun with opinions, and I am no longer young enough to foolishly believe my opinion is all that important for the world to hear. Annnnd, at some point, you've had the same opinions long enough that even you're bored with them. The world isn't going to change on some points, as foolish as they might be.

The world literally has more writers than it ever has. More published writers, too, now that the gatekeepers are barely holding the gates up, just so name celebrities can walk through. Can an individual writer's voice can be heard against the din? I wonder about that, too.

And we're all just fodder for somebody's AI or the other at this point. Any Zoom call your on is apt to have a little AI assistant quietly making notes of what was said, like a creepy little spy in the corner of the room. It can take the best of what you said, combine it with better things it learned from other places, and make its own swell-sounding statements.

It all can be pretty depressing, if one is leaning toward the gloom, especially with all the other shit flowing from a certain volcano of rot of late. And what can one do against all of these bleak omens of shadows overtaking the Earth?

I guess one can write. And even if one has nothing to say, there are still some words that will follow other words into forming sentences, and sentences into paragraphs. And maybe just have enough humanity left in the results to let our friends know that we're still alive and maybe not a software replicant of someone they used to know . . . for now.

And on we go.