Mercury’s Tricky Memories

If the soul of the city is defined by place, then the heart can be elsewhere?

Part of my own advice about dealing with Mercury in Retrograde would have to include shredding my 2002 paper records. As I understand accounting and record keeping guidelines for business, I should retain 7 years of receipts. That’s all my documentation, carefully collated and packed away, ready for an inquisition-style audit. I’m good like that — date a Virgo — I’ve become a compulsive receipt saver.

I sat down on an upturned milk crate, parked next to the shredder. I pulled out the 2002 records and started to feed them into the little whirring blades. I had four legal-size envelopes stuffed full, maybe five inches of papers, mostly bank and credit statements, plus meal receipts carefully labelled with locations and guests.

Four legal-sized envelopes became three trash bags full of shredded data.

Travel records, old airline boarding passes, scraps of paper to validate my existence. Ticket stubs. A couple of tickets shook out of one of the envelopes, so I paused and started looking for other, similar treasures.

The first Austin City Limits event. Before it was a big deal, and when it was just around the corner from a trailer park. Just memories.

The ticket above was Robert Plant, a few weeks earlier. I hear people in new East Austin have run into him, buying toilet paper at the grocery store.