DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Contrary to what I told all the folks I was hoping would help me move, I really do have a lot of junk. It was not a light move in any sense. We’d purged beforehand, shredding years of old credit-card statements and tax returns, and driving two carloads of useful but unloved furniture and clothes to Goodwill and the Salvation Army, but even so we were left with a house full of stuff.

Can a pack rat learn feng shui? A friend opines that by accumulating junk, one is expressing doubt that the universe will provide that which is needed, when it is needed. It seems to me if there’s anyone you don’t want to offend, it’s the universe, and so I immediately pledged to offload a large percentage of my accumulations. That was last December.

I still pledge to do that. Really. Erm, do I have to do it right away?

It’s at this point I tend to use a phrase that makes my pragmatic German relations laugh: I like the idea of keeping only the things I currently use… I’m just having trouble with the implementation. I think I don’t have a ton of certifiably useless junk stored away, but I probably do have a ton of stuff I’m fond of but won’t actually ever use. And hey, my new house has a garage. Maybe this is the universe’s way of telling me it’s OK to keep those 10 cubic yards of chattel.

Somewhere, in three of those boxes, are about 250 old science fiction paperbacks from the 1980s… Heinlein, Harrison, Asimov, Adams and so on. All my life I’ve lugged these books along, from apartment to apartment and house to house, with the idea that I’d eventually have a library where I’d display the collection. I find it ironic that, now that I have a room for such a library, I also have a new design sense, or perhaps a lack of design sense, or maybe it’s a sense of a lack of design. In a word, I demand austerity. I want unadorned space. I don’t want empty shelves — I don’t want the shelves in the first place. So I’m pretty sure I don’t want a room lined with the entire Tor catalog, 1981-1985.

I had never seen the word impedimenta before writing this piece, but it’s so wholly appropriate I may actually go re-label all the boxes in my garage.