Slackjaw's Forum

I have a large box…It's an old beer case really, from back when they were still made out of hard cardboard and you had to open them from the top. It's a Miller case that I have lugged around with me since I moved to Olympia back in 1980. In it I used to throw the mail I would get from friends I left behind overseas, letters from Sweetie, who loves me still, old birthday cards, bad song lyrics, pictures and other assorted odds and ends. Today it's full, as it has been for about the last ten or fifteen years, sitting in a back closet minding it's own business and gathering dust. You may not believe me but I am not a person who usually holds on to things like that. Having moved around a lot in my life, I've become more than adept at throwing things out. I am not the kind of manic hoarder you no doubt envision me, having held on to a box of letters from over twenty years ago. Nor am I much of a sentimentalist. I don't take them out periodically like old...

Sweetie found a purse in the garbage can last night. With the exception of a few cough drops, some gum, three cigarettes one floppy disk and a few bank receipts it was empty. Of course the first thought was that the purse might have been stolen and simply discarded after it had been cleaned out. The only real clue we had to go on is the fact that there is a name in one of the word documents on the floppy disk. Unfortunately the trail kind of ends there as there is no same name in the phone book or on line. We have an orphaned purse that right now it’s sitting on the table in the kitchen. Or we don’t…we might have an abandoned purse sitting on the table in the kitchen. There’s a small difference in those two sentences I think. As an orphaned purse, the purse holds no blame for its predicament, but as an abandoned purse, though still technically not to blame, one gets suspicious that maybe the purse did something to bring this abandonment upon itself. Perhaps it was a purse...