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.

Relatively Crazy

The world is a crazy place and seems to be getting crazier by the minute. It's not that the crazy train hasn't been riding the rails for years, but similar to the new normal of our weather patterns, the crazies get wilder, more extreme and more unpredictable with each advancing day. It would not particularly surprise me if it was announced that North Korea allowed their citizens access to news on American airwaves just so Kim Jong-Un could point at the American President and say, "See? It's not me who's crazy. That guy gives crazy a whole new meaning!"

Even here in Kingston some people may think the crazies have touched down. We now have everything in place to construct the third crossing. To many out-of-towners, I'm sure when they are first exposed to our constant dialogue about the Third Crossing, they must imagine some sort of historical, religious or political event that has had a profound effect on the people of our city. Once it's found to be just a bridge construction, I am sure they would be a bit disappointed. This bridge construction is something that has been poked, prodded, studied, debated, written about, argued about, vilified, glorified, cursed and praised and now it's fact. More mental energy has been wasted on this project than almost any local issue I can remember.

As Billy Joel so aptly put it in his 1989 hit, "We Didn't Start the Fire", the crazies didn't start in today's world and I'm sure if he felt inclined, he could have started his song lyrics long before 1949, the year of his birth.  I'm sure our friend Oog, that loveable caveman, thought that his buddy was, to put in today's vernacular, totally cra-cra when he started to cook meat. Crazy is all relative, but I should point out that not all relatives are crazy.

Technology has certainly lent itself to the advances of crazy. I look at the behaviour of many people today and if one were to transplant that behaviour to 20 or 30 years ago people would be looking at them and at the same time doing the cuckoo bird salute, twirling their fingers beside their temples. A lot of people seem to shut out the world, sequestering themselves in their houses. Their only link to the outside world is a computer, tablet or phone screen. Even when they venture outside, the world is shut out. The wander the sidewalks with ear buds in their ears and eyes averted downward to phones, stumbling blindly into telephone poles, traffic or other people. Perhaps, if they activated their cameras on the phone, they could watch where they are going on their screens, then update their progress on Instagram.

The relativity of things, is not new, it existed long before Einstein developed his theory, we just didn't recognize it. But that is true of many things. In absolute terms time is, at least to our current knowledge, pretty linear. A year is a year no matter which way you look at it. Just the same as a decade is 10 years and a millennium is a 1,000 years. It doesn't speed up or slow down (within reason). But what happens during those periods vary. Advances in science, society and structures have grown by leaps and bounds.

I often befuddle myself, which I may point out before anyone else does, is a fairly easy task, when I think about music and its relativity. Today's kids, be they as young as 4 or 5 into even their 30's likely all recognize and perhaps even actively listen to music from the 1950's and 1960's; the Beatles, the Stones, Elvis, Buddy Holly or any number of artists. In some cases this is reaching back as much as 60 years in some cases, but the music does seem as fresh and as innovative as ever. If I were to apply this time line to myself when I was 18 and at the height of my musical awareness and music had its strongest influence over me and I reached back even 40 -50 years in musical history, this would like groovin' to the megaphone tunes of Al Jolson or Rudy Valee and the Connecticut Yankees. Social outcast, I likely would have been. It was hard enough to even acknowledge that you listened to the Beach Boys back in the '70's.

Perhaps this can be attributed to the music from those periods being so readily available online and in pop culture. Music is so much more accessible today as compared to my day. In those days if you wanted to listen to Al Jolson you had to pray that your grandfather still had some disks for the Victrola or bang it out on the parlour room piano if you had the sheet music.  

But just as crazy is relative and music is relative, so is the rest of life.  There are always two sides to every issue, just as there are two sides to every coin. There wouldn't be one without the other. Whether this is good or bad is a whole other debate, relatively speaking.