The Letting Go

Okay, okay, okay…call this wobbly section “spirited expulsions from one man’s existential crisis” or “graphic design housecleaning” or what have you? As I come to grips with time, space, aging, the buttcrack of middle age, pairing down, getting back space, making peace with it all, biddind farewell and saying good-bye and letting go. Let this little zone be a weird cluster of items I parted with, but snapped a couple shots before I recycled them, shitcanned them into the trash or dropped ’em off at a donation center. Getting the space back and letting go? FEELS GOOD.

 

My Stash of Old Zip Disks

Here’s my old stash of Zip disks from 1996-2004. My first machine came with an internal Zip and Jaz drive. The Jaz drive shat out a couple months into the new machine. That little Zip drive worked flawlessly for me those four years. And some twenty years later doing some spring cleaning, I come across my stash of Zip discs, back-up burned DVDs and assorted obsolete external drives. What to do with this stuff? It filled a whole drawer! Hadn’t touched them in years and made the call the get rid of them. First, I had to track down a working USB Zip drive. Scored one off eBay for $75, only to find out the newer Macs don’t even read them?! Luckily, we had an old hand-me-down laptop of Leigh’s that would still fire up, and that worked. It had an operating system from 2019 on it, and still recognized USBs and burned DVDs. I yanked all the data off the stash and transferred it to my litany of external back-up drives. Once the data was secure and all the discs zeroed out, I snapped pictures of the mess, simply for posterity. Just in case I got a little wistful after recycling them, I could revisit them to see them in all their glory. That’s what you’ve got here down below. My Zip disk stash and their covers! 100mb’ers from a time gone by!