Stuff

I've got too much stuff.  It's funny that after years of a relentless pursuit in the acquisition of stuff, now all I want to do is get rid of it. The hang-up is, I just can't throw it away, it's good stuff, that's why I kept it in the first place. For sure, there is stuff that could go if I was a heartless human being. Children's' drawings, if you can call crayon scribbles on a 24" x 24'' piece of  kraft paper a drawing, is a prime example. These renderings haven't seen the light of day in decades, but yet, there they sit. Years of Mothers and Fathers Day hand crafted cards, notebooks from every year of public school and virtually anything that touched their hands have found their way into bins of untouched memories.  The matters only get worse when you have more than one child, in our case it was times three.  I once offered to return theses masterpieces to their creators but every one of them gave me that, 'you're not pawning them off on me' kind of glance. We did try and go through them once, but all that really accomplished was me getting all misty eyed. Not necessarily from the memories, but from the mould and dust that wafted up.

I am sure if I went back 50 years and told myself that the accumulation of stuff would become a problem in my later years, my response would be something like. "Old man, go back to the future. Can't you see I'm a carefree child of the 60's?"  I was not a very perceptive  kid back then, or now, for that matter.  But yes, the seeds of accumulating stuff were planted back then.  As an example, back in the sixties between my cousins and I, we had enough GI Joe's and related gear to fill far more than the 4 footlockers we already had.  We likely had enough troop compliments and associated equipment to serve as an actual battalion and even then, we didn't stop collecting.

I don't know why as young adults the acquisition of stuff was so important. But, it certainly seemed to be important at the time.  Perhaps it was a keeping up with the Jones' type of thing, or perhaps more likely, keeping ahead of the Jones'. "What do you mean, you don't have this stuff?" Of course, that was the era where your stuff defined who you were. Every young upward professional (affectionately known as yuppies) had to have this stuff.

To compound the problem, I am the type of person who infrequently loses things and rarely breaks things.  Even if something did break, I would think, 'well that is easy to repair. I'll just save it and fix it later'. I have a graveyard, or should I say a stuff infirmary, of slightly damaged goods piling up in the basement awaiting treatment.

As my wife never tires of pointing out, the same applies to the relentless game of keeping up with technology. Every time the latest and the greatest came out, the oldest and the lamest was delegated to the basement to begin its second career as a space occupier and dust collector. I have bins of tech stuff'; power cords, AC adapters of every possible output, floppy disks and hard drives with an astonishing capacity of 250 megabytes. The kind of things that you know, might come in handy someday. 

I wrote a story a while back, where the only technology that wasn't hackable or part of the internet of things, were all those old tech products that didn't have a backdoor built into them by the nefarious antagonist (not named Bill Gates) who felt if he could control all technology he could easily dominate the world.  The heroes of the day used all of those old computers and cell phones that were collecting dust in basements around the world  to win the day and save humanity.  Although, when I laid this scenario onto my ever skeptical wife as the reason for saving all this stuff, she was not very understanding or confident of my prognostic abilities.

If I went back in time once more to that same non-perceptive kid and asked him if he could believe that in 50 years, entrepreneurs would seize upon the populations need for accumulating stuff and would build a multi-billion dollar business from it.  To imagine that they would build utilitarian boxed buildings so people who had no room left at home for their stuff could load it all in a car or truck and move it to another place to store it. Then to top things off, people would actually pay somebody to let them save their stuff.  I am sure he wouldn't care, cause you know, he was 13 and wouldn't have a clue what an entrepreneur was and as was pointed out early, wasn't really perceptive enough to even care about things like that.

But even if an adult was asked the same question back then, I am sure they would have laughed in my face and pointed out that you can never have enough stuff.  As for paying someone to let you save stuff? Well, I'm sure they would fall back to the belief that a fool and his money would soon be parted.  Just looking at the number of storage buildings around the country today, I guess there are a lot of fools out there, me included.