I Do Not Countenance Erasure

I’m not a fan of Depeche Mode either, but that’s a completely different issue altogether.

When I went up to Temple a few days ago, I found myself accidentally rolling up to a cache that I had failed to find before and would have bypassed if I had realized which one it was. A similar thing happened to me on Monday. I chose a cache and, when I arrived, I realized it was one I had tried last year and couldn’t find. Nothing about the hide’s description made sense regarding the location, but I knew it was there because people had been finding it. And I was there, so I gave it another shot. This times I got lucky. I found it at the bottom of a fence and I’m pretty sure it was actually hidden on the other side but had fallen to the ground. Of course, the inside was part of some kind of pumping station or other civic water work, so I’m not sure how one was supposed to enter to get to it if that was the case. I neither know nor care. Inveni, inscripsi, and I reposui’d it back to where I found it, pretty sure that that’s not where it belonged. Lucky for me, sure, but it started me thinking about something.

How often do you ignore caches? I mean actively put them on the ignore list so that they’re never seen in searches again? That’s something I’ve been considering for quite a while, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to do. There have been cachers in the past with hides so annoying or problematic that I would pass them up for no other reason than their name was attached (and no, local-to-me peeps reading this, I’m not referring to anyone still around here). I thought then seriously about just removing their caches from my map one by one so I wouldn’t even have to think about them any longer. I never did it because I realized that I might conflict with their now unseen caches when I tried to hide things in the future (I’d already found one of theirs because of that exact scenario). That, and to me there’s something wrong with removing something from the map in that fashion. Even if I don’t like a cache, I at least want to know it’s there. I can avoid it on my own and if someone I’m with wants to go after it, I’m more than willing to tag along and that’s a lot harder if I can’t see where it is. And all this has started me thinking about something else.

Why do I have to be conflicted about such silly things? I don’t have to examine Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer every moment of every day or anything, but surely I can spend my time considering less dumb things?