So, here’s my purple bag. It’s manufactured, really, since I don’t carry a bag or even a wallet. As you can see, there are no keys or credit cards. I don’t lock my house or my bike . . . the only thing I really value is my computer . . . and that I usually carry with me. The lipstick is empty . . . Perhaps I should buy some more . . . a brand and color I’ve worn for 30 years . . .

Of course, there’s also Jack:

He’s new.

Since I live on/by my computer, I suppose this generated collection says . . . I have no life? Lol . . . the computer has my life on it in writing for the last 10 years . . . with back ups, of course . . . it holds pretty much all my thoughts, plans, actions, hopes, dreams, dreams gone and lost for that time frame.

Since I worked most of that time as a part-time writer and English language instructor, I think it says that I’m language engaged . . . and now that the keys on my computer are beginning to stick . . . the letter ‘r’ doesn’t actually work (I have a work around) and letters ‘e’, ‘s’ and ‘n’ are following close behind. My cursor also jumps. I’ll be typing along and suddenly my cursor will jump up and back a few lines, inserting letters in unexpected places, like my life, disruptions I cannot avoid or predict. A jumpy jumbled overwritten life. Some day I’ll write a page that way, letting the cursor take me and set me down where it may, disarray, not correcting the missing letters . . . and call the result, poetry.

It’s occurring to me that the image of the bag that I manufactured for purposes of this assignment oddly echoes the image of myself that I outwardly project . . . one of normality, with a few unexpected missing bits (like keys, credit cards, money, photos) . . . but it takes a second to realize those expected items are not part of this particular repertoire. But perhaps it isn’t odd, since the me I present to the world is as manufactured as the materials in the photo . . . except Jack, of course.

Jack is the evidence that I am returning to life after a long hiatus. He is ever-present and demands that I be, too.

Nothing else matters in the bag, really, except the dog poop bags. Jack shits the biggest loads I’ve witnessed in a dog; impressive, really. I never leave home with fewer than 3 bags; he’s real work to clean up after (laugh). I think it embarrasses him a  bit, too; he finds places where I cannot reach for his emissions, deep under evergreens with dense low-hanging branches and prickly needles . . . hiding the shame piles from sight . . .

I have never carried a bag with any regularity, not even a gym bag, really. It reflects my utilitarian nature; I hate being burdened with stuff . . . any archeologist who found my bag would toss it aside in disgust, wondering, who packs designer lipstick but not a mobile or credit card? Perhaps it reflects a conflicted nature, the lipstick wanting in, but the person too bored or weary or cynical to bother . . .

People who know me (there are few) sometimes remark that I am a luddite, but they are wrong; I’m selective and a maverick. I do not carry a mobile since I think they are a joke on the 21st century, and I refuse to become subject to it (the joke or the mobile). My computer has all kinds of applications on it that I use with regularity and ease–data base, spreadsheet, text programs–and few people know the amount that I once wrote, or for whom.

I like to think I’m a bit like my computer, an understated exterior of still-elegant design with signs of wear that opens to a rich and unexpectedly deep and varied interior . . . with a few glitches in some of the hardware . . . so the digital literacies in my bag are equally deceiving and the lack of phone, receipts, credit cards, other tell tale signs of a digital universe are neatly contained there, rich and deep, like me.