For those of you who do not already know, I am moving to Seattle tomorrow. I have been involved in the process of packing for several days now, and have come to a realization: Humans keep stupid, stupid things as keepsakes and memorabilia and simply junk in a box when they don’t know what to do with it.
Indeed, one never really knows exactly what kind of stupid things, nor the sheer amount, they have kept until they are forced to go through it all, transferring it from either one box to another or to the trash can (which I have named for the purposes of this post Thor the Devourer (TTD)). I have compiled a short list of things that I have fed to TTD in the last few days.
-Stacks of magazines, including Discover, Scientific American, Road and Track, Popular Mechanics and one really used copy of Car and Driver about the Pagani Zonda. Each of these magazines shares a common theme: they all have an article having to do with robots… I don’t know what my habitual hoarding of these articles means, but it kind of scares me.
-Clothes. Aside from the fact that I used to be a much bigger guy and thus had an entire closet of clothes that no longer fit me (Thor got several pairs of size 38 waist Jeans and slacks along with some shirts that look like they were made by Kelty and require fiberglass poles to erect), I faced the startling revelation that I used to dress like an idiot. That is the same feeling as when you realize that you have been walking around with your fly down all day; you know that everyone saw it and no one said anything to try to save you any face. And the meaner of your freinds took pictures and video so that you could remember it later. Those dicks. I just filled my closet with this screen-printed existential time-bomb and let it tick away until I broke from my fashion-retardation tradition and was forced to face it.
-Knick Knacks. I have lots of these. I seem to have a penchant for picking strange things up off the ground and putting them in my pocket. This is not to put them in the nearst trash receptacle as soon as I can but so that I can leave them in bizarre places in my room to be found when I pack to move somewhere, forcing me to utter – not for the first time – why the hell do I have a piece of asphault, a severely beaten Stitch action figure and what can only be a really, really old corn chip sitting next to my mixer? I would like to mention that my shrunken head and Capt. Rupert P. Murduck (esquire) – my travelling companion in Europe and occasional confidant – are both excluded from this list as they have made several moves with me and have always avoided Thor’s gaping maw.
-Little bits of paper. Why the hell are there little bits of paper laying all over the damn place in my room? In corners, uder the bed, between stacks of CD’s, right in the middle of the freakin floor… everywhere there are little bits of wadded up reciepts, straw wrappers and god-knows-what. Where do they come from?! What do they want?! We may never know.
-Closet stuff. I’m not going to go through all of the weird things I found in my closet. Between the old electronics (Thor), pictures and detritus of past relationships (Thor), posters and stuff from my old college apartments (Thor) and various and sundry other things there are too many stories and I have to get on with the packing debacle.
So there it is: proof positive that people collect adn accumulate random and crazy things that they don’t need or often even want simply because they are human and have this compulsion. It’s strange, but if you tell me that you could go pack your stuff right now and not run into some of this stuff, you are a liar and I hate your face.
