Monday, November 21, 2011

A Place for my Stuff

Today I went to the annual record convention I have been attending since I was in high school(that's fifteen plus years if you're counting). Picked up two lp's. That is a fraction of the records I used to buy back in the day. Be it from shops, Ebay(a major culprit in this story) or hand me downs. I've always made a conscious effort to try and trade or sell at least a percentage of what I bring in. This is to keep from drowning in clutter. I have succeeded for the most part. After picking up some 100 or more lp's a year in that time, my collection stays at a manageable 1,000 or so(never counted, rough estimate). Is it because I really don't want to possess all these things? Of course not. All the covers, all the music contained within for the most part are gold to me. But I simply ran out of space. In the process of moving from my first apartment to the second to a rental house(where a flood mercifully wiped out alot of my junk) to my current house that I own, I have filled so many trashcans full of stuff that it baffles me. How did this happen? Was that all money flushed down the toilet? Yes. I am a Hoarder in waiting, and I have to fight every day to keep my environment liveable.

The show Hoarders( and its knockoff Hoarding: Buried Alive) scare the living shit out of me whenever I watch them. This kind of scene has been a part of my otherwise organized life since I moved out of my parents' house. Their house always seemed fairly clean. My grandma would always scoff when she came over(her house being a palace of sterile suckiness where kids could find little fun). Of course, she didn't work and had her entire adult life to maintain such perfection. I'm sure this is the case with all of you out there. So at my first apartment, my future wife and I had to cram all our childhood belongings into a space the size of an ice cream truck. Add to that all the shit I bought once I got some real money working, her Mary Kay supplies and tons of hand me downs from our thoughtless parents, and you get pretty much a nightmare. We somehow managed to squeeze ourselves into a new(slightly bigger place)along with her sister(bringing almost as much junk as the two of us combined) into a newer space. From there we went to the house, where the afore mentioned flood saw fit to help purge us of a miniscule amount of that junk. But moving to our current house(across town in a blizzard) was the last straw for me. The new house immediately had a dumping ground(the bedroom) and secondary dumping ground(the "office"). Then we got a dog who got in to and ate everything in sight. Something had to be done.

Since that date in 2007, I have waged war against clutter. I do the laundry, dishes, sort mail, and recycle like a madman. So mush so that it occupies a lot of my valuable free time. But I refuse to live like the Fraggle Rock Trash Heap. I want order. I want clean surfaces. I want to find my fucking keys every day before work. Who do I blame for this predicament?  First off, the US Postal Service. Drop dead, you useless fucks. You send more bullshit into my house(unwarranted or asked for, mind you) than anyone else. Is your primary function at this stage in your antiquated life to simply spam my house so full of shit that I need a professional shredding service to come by with a thresher and drive it through my living room? Fuck you. Fuck your fat, lazy(and might I add, ugly) employees who only have jobs because you illegally dump,as I see it, metric tons of useless home repair coupons(that I can't possibly afford), nonsense newsletters from my crap city and statements from bills we pay ONLINE into my house like some cumdumpster awaiting your inky ejaculate of BULLSHIT! Second, I blame family. Stop buying us stuff. We don't need it. I know you have money and time to waste. Go feed some god damn orphans or something. You are doing more harm than good. We don't even have kids. I can only imagine the third world catastrophe that would be present if we did. Needless to say, the flood did a bigger service to our parents. It took everyone in the family days to clear out the water logged basement of their house. I felt sorry for the treelawn. Lastly, I blame China. Thanks for making things that break within a year of buying them(that we all keep for a couple of years hoping to "fix"). Now, whenever some Chinese piece of crap(xmas lights, dehumidifier, computer monitor, shoe) breaks, I instantly pitch it. You can't fix that garbage. It costs more to do so than just replace it. I guess that's their master plan. Fill America with landfills and tons of debt. Easier than starting a war.

Now I sit at the precipice of doom. Two elder parent households full of garbage that we will eventually have to deal with. My own house, now currently manageable, but by no means clean. And a society of jobless idiots who will someday be ripping off my copper pipes to sell for scrap, but leaving my Powerpuff Girl pillows and projection tv's behind. We are so committed to purging that we even unloaded a precious $300 Kitchen Aide mixer onto my mom. Hey, she bakes, we don't. Easy solution. Did we buy said mixer? Of course not. It was another "gift". I am so envious when I visit friends who live in IKEA furnished yoga studios of zen emptiness. Why can't that be me? Why do I go to resale shops and garage sales? Why is it so hard to throw shit out? I think that's why I love staying in hotel rooms. They are so simple. Bed, shower, bible, coffeemaker, tv, and air conditioner. They even dispensed with the stupid telephone. I think being a travelling salesman, rockstar or grifter would be a sublime existence. Nothing to pick up, no carpet to vacuum, no toilet to scrub. I feel so weighed down by my things.



Thus how I picked the title of this article. It was a George Carlin routine about how we weigh ourselves down with belongings. The problem is, without these "things", I am nothing. They define me, for better or for worse. I need my records, toys, clothes, my dog's toys, etc. Why the fuck else do I go to work? I could be one of these occupy Wall street assholes and live in a tent. But I was brought up to learn living like that meant one was a failure. I still agree with that. We need our space, we need our stuff, we need to show our stuff off to lazy idiots who won't work for any of it. I just need less Journeys catalogs, water bottles, and cell phone chargers. I need some stuff(maybe a robot) who can go through my stuff for me. Or a Chinese kid. But shit, how long until we have a bunch of those crowding up our houses?