I have a few notes, but the one that contained nearly 100% of my writing ideas was titled "Anathema."  iPhones take the liberty of titling your notes whatever the first word or words that you write for in it.  This particular note was created so long ago that I don't even remember why I created a new note and wrote the word "anathema," but I just did.  I think I heard the word somewhere and just meant to look up what it meant.

Anyway, that's how it went a couple years ago.  I just wrote the word "anathema" into a new note and added more and more random thoughts on that note for the next two years.  Anathema eventually became this thing -- a holding cell for my ideas, as they sat and waited to be individually plucked, inserted into a blank Microsoft word document where they could blossom into a full, robust idea that would become a blog post or short story.

I'm sad to say that didn't happen.

Anathema died, along with all of the ideas inside of it.

Accidentally deleted.

Gone forever.

I don't know what happened.  I needed my Comcast password, which I knew I had written down amongst all of the other random things in Anathema.  The only trouble was that Anathema had grown to be so large that it would have taken me too much time to manually scroll through the note.  Naturally, I opened up the "search" feature, typed "comcast" and my Anathema note file popped up as the first result.  I clicked it, but instead of being taken to the section of the note that had the information I desired, nothing but a blank note appeared.

As I said, I don't know what happened or how it happened.  But this blank note was Anathema, void of everything. 

And no, I don't back up anything on my phone.

When I started to write this post, I was going to conclude it with a lesson: Back up your shit.  But then I realized that for me, losing Anathema should teach me a more important lesson: Actually do your shit.

The sheer amount of ideas, thoughts, opinions, quotes, and dreams that were lost in that file break my heart, sure.  But the volume should suggest that I spend way too much time thinking about ideas and virtually no time at all implementing those ideas into their full form.  Many of those ideas could have been salvaged had I simply sat my ass down at the computer and plucked them out one at a time.

So yea.  I should back up my stuff more often than once every five years.  But more importantly, what's the point of getting ideas and writing them down if I'm going to let that be their final form?

And so:

Look at me go.

-Youngman Brown

For the record: