Recently, I delved into My Documents and had a look through over 12 months’ worth of homemade literature. You’ll never guess what I found.

I currently have four folders set up with around 18 personally written pieces in each. These folders are named, Articles; Newer Articles; Even Newer Articles; Newest Articles. (No idea what I’ll name the next one but.) I opened Newer Articles. Nestled between Mit Reklaw’s Music and Mit Reklaw’s Truth on Antiperspirant – both fine articles of yesteryear – there was one document which caught my eye. It was entitled simply, untitled.

‘Oh, right,’ I thought/mumbled after a brief moment of confusion, ‘that’ll be Mit Reklaw’s Unentitled, from memory, written shortly before Christmas 2013…’

‘But hang on,’ came the immediate response (amazing how fast a conversation can proceed when it’s being held by the head of just one man), ‘why would I not have named Mit Reklaw’s Unentitled, Mit Reklaw’s Unentitled? Why would I have called it just, untitled, thereby avoiding the ostensible spelling mistake that was ultimately the essence of the article?’ (By this time I believe the thought/mumbling process had become rather more ‘thought’ orientated.) ‘More to the point,’ I thought/mumbled with emphasis on the former, ‘how ever could I have committed my very own cardinal sin by Not Capitalising Words of a Title? (Conjunctions and prepositions don’t count.)

Alarming as the whole ‘untitled’ escapade was, more alarming I think is reading back over this as it’s being written and observing just how long it took me to position the bloody cursor on this mystery file and just open the Goddamned thing.

Am I going for suspense, or am I an inherently dilatory person? Funny how I only ever query that kind of thing once the time has already been wasted.

Prior to opening the file I hovered the cursor and saw that it was written in October of 2013. Interesting. At that time my computer literacy was still very much incipient and in fact, as I recall I was receiving professional tutelage on that very thing – in the hope of one day becoming the IT paragon that I’m certain you can all imagine as the author behind this fluently verbose and exquisitely scintillating articulation.

Click-click.

Who wants to wager on what I saw? Odds for a blank page – $1.80:1; something written in my sleep – $16.20:1; a ransom note for someone of whom I’ve yet to notice the absence – $4.25:1; something penned from beyond the grave – $56.90:1; something written by a hapless hacker who wasted his time infiltrating Tim Walker’s My Documents – $8.21:1; an article I wrote then saved without a title then wrote some more then gave a title then saved again therefore inadvertently making another copy so when I deleted Mit Reklaw’s Raw, I actually didn’t delete it at all. At least not the second draft…

I found it heart-warming to peruse two and a half thousand words – a startlingly high percentage of which were profane – written by a version of me not often seen by the world and indeed, not overly conducive to a life of smooth sailing. It was written so long ago that I had forgotten what it’s like to feel so utterly helpless.

Also angry.

Article by Tim Walker

Edited by C U Sune

Photography by B A Blast