I’m not too sure if this counts as a pirate story, but I’ve lost treasure. I once asked a mate to take responsibility for most valued possessions before I made some big move in my life. I packed everything into a bunch of milk crates that seemed purposefully designed for it. I already had two functioning as legs to my television table, and a third and forth housing my records, but I needed a fifth and had it that evening from the local milk-bar. I’m sure the designer of the milk crate went on into a prolific, productive, and wealthy life in the compactor business. Into the remaining three milk crates I put a stack of books, and momentos; anything I could think of that was important to me such as old faxes. Sweet nothings on fax paper; talk about fading memories. I met my friend years after and things turned to music and records – first of, best of, concerts you’d seen that sort of thing; as you’d expect. I asked him about my old record collection. It was gone, well most of it. The CD was taking over and anyone who was into vinyl wanted good condition stuff. Five or six years into the CD revolution, he stared releasing my collection to the public, the connoisseurs, from my very limited library and that was pretty much all gone within months. That was something that shook me to my core. Not so much because that music had disappeared forever, but because I hadn’t but to listen to it again and I’d have to go out and buy it. That probably more than anything made me nostalgic for my record collection. However, also realizing there were albums there like the first I’d ever bought—Houses of the Holy that I had a connection with and were lost irretrievably, made me ask for the rest of my junk to finger through. That’s when I found the faxes. The dead-sea scrolls survived thousands of years, but somewhere in America a scientist had come up with a process of built in obsolescence that dissolved messages in sunlight. A failed career in the invisible ink business had made for a momentary engineering job as a paper and ink guy for fax technology. I’d found my memories, my blog and it had faded. Mostly I couldn’t read it and the parts that I could were just teasers. I tried hard to piece it together, get it all straight but it wasn’t and hasn’t been easy. I’ve got lost treasure.