Voodoo Time Dot Com

Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.

Such are the words of Lao-tzu, a sixth century B.C. philosopher and father of Taoism. This is stuff that is expressed in many of the world’s popular religions, but rarely practiced by their adherents. It is with an apartment full of boxes that I reflect on this idea. I have too much junk.

A little over a month ago, we moved to a new apartment, comparable in square-footage to our previous place. The main difference being the storage closet on the patio. At our last place it was stuffed full of junk. At this place, it houses a washing machine, dryer, and water heater. I lost my junk room. Now I have to find creative places to hide all the junk that used to sit outside and out of the way.

I know I’m not alone in this. People who have homes don’t park their cars in their garages anymore because the garage is filled with all the junk that won’t fit in the attic and/or basement. So, now I sit in the midst of stuff that I haven’t thought about in ages, but just can’t seem to throw away.

Here’s a sample of my junk:
* A huge pile of old computer game boxes - Hey, it’s nostalgic!
* Various computer parts - You never know when you’ll need a PII-300 CPU or 70-nanosecond RAM.
* Boxes for various big-ticket items - because they always ask you to send it in the original box if you have to get it fixed. Plus, the original box could get me another $10 on eBay someday.
* Old college textbooks - I paid like $100 a piece for them. There has got to be some other use for them! I just haven’t found it yet.
* Action figures, comic books, and baseball cards - When I’m 70 I’ll be able to sell them all to collectors and buy a brand new 2048 Corvette.

My closets are so full of junk, that all my skeletons have to hide under the bed! Ha! Get it? No..? Okay…

Anyway, the big question is, how on earth do I extricate myself from our western consumer culture long enough to objectively determine what I can get rid of? And how do I keep from absorbing more useless junk in the future? More realistically, does anyone have garage space I can rent cheap?

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 28th, 2002 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.