000.0 HAR ibid.

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It's been a perfectly foul day here today; in fact it was perfectly foul all last night, as it is perfectly foul now, at gone seven in the evening; the awful winds having given way to torrential rain in their wake. We were dog-sitting today, and even Lady, a Black Lab Collie cross not given to reticence about the weather, decided that curling up and sleeping was by far the best option to take. So, apart from a short morning trip to the council recycling centre to offload more stuff from our over-burdened estate, we've also spent the day closeted in Fairview Heights with little inclination to venture forth.

Given this extended break from garden clearance and general property maintenance, I've been starting in on my latest OCD-backed project of trying to organise and catalogue my modest library of a couple of thousand or so books and my accumulation of loosely-filed documents and pulled references; all of which help to feed the maw of this blog, and serve as a pre-internet [most of it] and certainly pre-AI reality-checking device, to help guide the way through the morass of slop data and content that washes up on our perceptual shores daily.

I'm using the good old Dewey system of classification as the basis for making sense of my stuff, although I'll be using an online system to make the first pass classifications of documents, which I'll then double check using the actual DDC books; although to be fair, as this is mostly for my benefit alone, I'm not being as picky as a true librarian might be. What I'm interested in is the cross-fertilisation of themes and ideas that often get separated by some distance in Dewey: my failed attempts to get to grips with Luhmann and the Zettelkasten serving only to reinforce this frustration has led me to the conclusion that I should try something different and that more suits the slightly weird way my brain views the world.

Of course, this path mirrors the shortcomings of nearly every attempt to organise data on a human, mechanical level, throughout history [cf. Krajewski, Markus: Paper Machines, About Cards & Catalogues, 1548-1929; 2011, MIT Press:- Dewey classification: 025.3 KRA], but I'll try and leave sufficient notes to help decode it all, should I achieve this task before my eventual demise. That the exercise is inherently OCD and possibly - probably - ultimately pointless to anyone outside of my brain, ie. everyone else, is neither moss nor sand to me. I like to challenge my thought processes, quite often through the abstractions of philosophical or theological argument, or even by still trying to get to grips with mathematics and physics I really don't have the intellectual tools to fully grasp: the point and the purpose is the doing itself. If I give the venture up because I discover I'm stuck in a dead end, then I've lost nothing and gained in the investigation itself: life in a nutshell, really...

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