This post is an elaborate way of making myself feel better about the digital clutter that supports and fuels my creative process. Below I have listed the contents of my open tabs collection across a few computing devices, and mixed in are Bookmarks from the last 30 days on Twitter.

The point is to finally DO something conclusive with this information and reward myself with a sense of closure. I want to be free from the low-grade guilt and sense of failure mounting each day that I don’t do whatever more I had hoped I could do with the information tabbed and never revisited month after month after month after…

I’m of a certain generation where I still love paper. I never took to writing “notes” on the computer or organizing webpages in desktop browser bookmarks. I’ve been keeping paper bound journals for personal reflections since I was 12. I keep a notebook (more than one) where I perpetually list and relist what I need to do and then I strike through or put a check next to the things as I do them. Or, I rewrite the things in new combinations of things I consistently neglect to do but still hope to (one day). I’ve even started buying and reading a paper newspaper on the weekends (FT!).

Paper is a nostalgic and sensual throwback - I know. But also, I’ll never stop believing that a physical representation of information in a form you can touch while seeing many different things all at a glance can make for MORE efficient organization and use of information. I struggle with stashing (and hiding) information in too many places as I move around the internet and domains of my digital work. Then what happens?

Out of sight is out of mind, and that’s not helpful. There’s a percentage of this information that I digest real time, engage with productively and then dispense with. But it feels like a good chunk of information stays in a Schrodinger’s cat state waiting for me to decide its fate. Some of these are valuable links someone dropped in a Zoom chat. They have been waiting ever since for me to circle back.

For one reason or another I keep a tangle of different browser Windows and Tabs (I’m a taboooorrrr) open on my devices. Maybe you do too. Welp, today I did something about it. About the tabs. They are now closed. All of them. Everywhere. Gone. Forever. I feel amazing!

The bookmark links from Twitter I include here to create a false sense - but still satisfying - that I am doing something productive with the information and taking concrete steps toward reading, listening and then converting the insights, knowledge or references to… I’m not sure. But I can come back to this blog and think about it some more now that all the important bits are organized in a neat list I can see at a glance. Well, they are not organized. They are just listed - in no particular order. I like lists though.

I have - in fact - read (or listened) to the vast majority of these things with admittedly varying degrees of attention and completion.

KNOW THYSELF

The contents of this post have been accumulating (I’m an accumulatooorr too) for over 10 months and I need a FRESH START. To know me is to know that the diagnosis that best explains everything is that I am a frustrated artist. Someone could observe my life and “work” as a lawyer, entrepreneur, gallery owner, Web3 founder… and realize: MY GOD - it’s performance art! They would not be wrong.

So, if I am a kind of closet artist in Wall Street meets crypto drag, then my computing devices and internet accounts and blockchain presence would be a “distributed studio”. And if it’s all conceptually my studio then the best illustration I have for it would be the studio of Francis Bacon.

It would be nice to think that at the end days once my eyes close for the last time on this side that it might be said I created something(s) meaningful, impactful, complex, honest and beautiful with my time here. Like a Francis Bacon painting.

But I am not Francis Bacon and I need to clean up my (distributed) (virtual) studio! So, I’m putting the TAB and BOOKMARK links here where they may or may not be looked at by me ever again. And that’s okay too…

Truth be told, the information has largely already made its way into my awareness, study, understanding and knowledge with practical application in my work.

If there’s an illogical fear of loss that keeps me attached to open tabs, I hope publishing this post will be a source of reassurance that although the TABs may be closed, they will never be forgotten.