As a kid I enjoyed hiding keys and coins around the house in little metal boxes with magnets on the bottom.

When I got to college we were given a handbook of school rules. The only rule I remember was the one forbidding students from joining or forming secret societies. It seemed like a strange thing for the school to single out, and if anything I became inspired to go ahead and form some frivolous, but totally secret organization.

I think all people have secrets that not even those closest to them know. Not so much secret things or places, and nothing as mundane as a mistress or a "double life."

I think what all individuals possess in their minds are experiences that will never be recounted and connections among them that no one could ever understand.

I accumulate things, and I think that the outwardly negative appearance of this inclination is diluted and even romanticized when I stash accumulated objects in places where even I might be surprised to find them.

I used to take un-needed but somehow expressive objects, like store receipts or a found drivers license, and send them U.S. Mail to addresses I found at random in the Manhattan white pages.

Nowadays my thing is this: I go to a place in my neighborhood, I take pictures of that place, I go home and print pictures of that place on my photo printer, then I go back to that place and leave a stack of photos of that place. Sometimes I can do the whole drill in less than 15 minutes. I don't know if people who were at that spot have ever found the pictures of themselves 15 or 20 minutes later, but I hope they have.

I maintained a web log/blogger thing for a long time. No one ever saw it, and no one ever will. I never even looked at it. I typed things and submitted them but never looked at the final pages, and I tried hard to not re-read anything even as I was writing it. My blog was hidden behind three levels of password protection (all the passwords were long strings of gibberish that I never recorded) at a URL that no one could ever figure out. So I typed entries but couldn't read them.

Well, I shouldn't exaggerate. I could have read them, but it would have taken some effort. With some ingenuity I could have made it utterly impossible for me to read it, but that was never really the intent.

I never even mentioned the blogger to more than a couple of people. My joke about it was that if triple-X rated movies are for adults only then my web log was rated quintuple X, and absolutely no one was admitted.

Common sense, however, finally prevailed. I came to the not so shocking conclusion that the World Wide Web is a stupid place to put things that you don't want others to see.

It was a continuation of my off-line journals, which I've maintained for virtually as long as I've known how to write. It contained talk about the types of things I stopped writing about on this web site.

Part of the appeal for me was the interface. By suspending disbelief at only a superficial level, it felt like I was typing these ugly thoughts into a hole where not even I could get to them.

After a while I felt strange about having it on the Internet. Even while no one knew about it, I felt that having it there was unnecessary. I was exploiting the so-called secrecy of it by putting it on the world's most public computer network.

I can look across my living room right now and see books with stories and ramblings that I wrote as far back as the 1970s, and I have a couple of boxes filled with ramblings and stories and music that I composed through high school and college. There are also cassettes and videos of sounds and events that I recorded out of some need to document something.

I live alone, and probably always will, so I'm not concerned about leaving these books and papers lying around. It's unlikely anyone except me will ever accidentally encounter them, and even less likely they would interest anyone, myself included.

It did almost happened once. I had one of my books with me, and I remember vividly the sickening, frantic feeling that came over me as a friend picked it up and started to open it. He did not know what it was as I snatched it from him, and I never had to explain.

But in the event that I ever do feel a need to hide them somewhere, I'm not sure what I'd do. I've considered getting a safe-deposit box, but safe-deposit boxes don't impress me as being particularly safe or secure.

As a matter of fact the one place I came closest to actually buying a safe-deposit box was at the World Trade Center. I wonder if I still have the price sheet for that.

I ended up getting a post office box instead. The logic behind that choice was financial, and I thought I'd get dual use out of the P.O. box. I had a notion of using it for mail and for stashing stuff like spare apartment keys and emergency cash.

I never did that. The rules of the post office forbid using the box for storage, but that's not why I didn't do it. I just never did.

It has occurred to me over the years that if I were to die prematurely (as opposed to right on schedule) then I should leave for whoever finds me a list of the most important account names and passwords that I use.

Passwords are like the last frontier of privacy. A password frequently says something about the person who chose it. At other times it at least it says something about what the person who chose it thinks about them self.

Someone should prepare a study of the cultural significance of passwords.

I hate when I'm in a situation where someone else decides my password, and I can't change it. This used to happen at my last job. For years I was stuck with "HAPPY" as my password to a file server, and it made me wince every time I had to type it in.

This idea of putting your most important passwords in a safe place, or even including them in your will in some secure way, came up in my life on a BBS I used many years ago.

Someone on the BBS who everyone had known died unexpectedly, and at a very young age. So many people there felt completely disconnected at this chilly discovery that their lives were partly plugged in to their modems. Even though almost everyone there knew her primarily through the BBS and IRC, it was a cold, cruel twist to be informed by e-mail that she was gone.

My ex-girlfriend at the time, who was not especially friendly with me just then, did something that day that I've always respected. She called to tell me the news, before I saw or could have seen the e-mail bulletin that was sent out. She said she would have come over in person if she was in town, but that she just wanted me to hear it from a live person.

I took her example, and when that call ended I made another call my friend to tell him the news before he could have found out any other way.

Talk on the BBS revolved around what we should do with her "stuff." Should someone in charge get all her e-mail and files and send them on floppies to her parents? Did she leave something in her ~/home directory with any kind of message? These ideas surfaced after we learned that she knew all along she was going to die, but had never told anyone. So did she leave us a message? Were we to anything more to her than particles of entertainment?

I don't know that she did.

I haven't thought about this in a long time.