The stuff you own ends up owning you
Hi, my name is Rob (hi, Rob) and I’m a pack rat.
I’m not sure I can pinpoint where it all started, but I can tell you where it ended.
First, let me start by saying that the closets in my apartment don’t really function as the breezy repositories for clothing they’re meant to. In fact, I haven’t seen the carpeting of of them in a long, long time.
What is filled with is contingency. I keep things ‘just in case.’ Some people store practical things like bottles of water and cans of food in case of emergency.
Me? Well, I’ll tell it to you like this: I own a mannequin. Not only that, I have a mannequin and two extra mannequin limbs that don’t even fit the other mannequin. I found it one day behind a store on Main Street here in town and I went back after dark and loaded it into my trunk like it was an actual body, dropping the bag every time I saw a car drive by.
“But why?” you may rightly inquire.
You’re asking the wrong guy.
It’s a sort of perverted twist on Yoda’s advice to Luke Skywalker when he’s trying to lift the X-Wing: There is no why.
This sort of logic has worked for me for a long time. Alas, I was forced to shed some of my collected refuse prior to my cross-country move to Ukiah, but it doesn’t take long for me to collect more.
It never does.
The breaking point point came earlier this week when I was snowshoeing across the refuse that the overstuffed closet had expelled in despair.
I was starting a writing project and I was sure that I had a crate of unused notebooks at the bottom of the closet somewhere.
I began carefull pulling boxes out of the treacherous Jenga puzzle of cardboard that populated the closet when I thought I saw the crate as I was looking for.
As I reached down, one of the boxes flew right past my nose and landed directly on top of the red crate I was after. I jumped back, started that such a heavy object had flown so close to my face.
I lifted the flap on the recently gravity-impaired item and noted with dismay that the contents of the incredibly heavy cube that nearly crushed me was sand.
Sand. I was nearly killed by a box of sand.
What a way to go. I might as well get hit by a Geo Metro or get beaten to death by a 99-year-old woman. A box of sand? Come on.
That tore it for me, so from now on I’m off the sauce.
I’ve been clean for almost four days now (sparse clapping fills the room) and I’m sticking to it. My girlfriend Ash has been acting as my sponsor and I’m working through it.
Now, does anyone need a mannequin?