The Deep and Occasionally Problematic Significance of Stuff and Things

I’m not a hoarder, but I know why hoarders hoard.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, not so much in the sense that I sit around evenings sipping brown liquor and stroking my beard whilst ruminating on the philosophical implications of human relations with the objects in our lives, but in the back of my head, behind the magic curtain where the mystery machine churns away and occasionally pops out with a thought or an idea for a story or some other artifact of inspiration. And now that I’m moving again, and, more importantly, trying to empty out the storage space I’ve been renting since the last time I really felt like I had a home, the subject has come, once again, if not to then at least near the forefront of my consciousness.

The problem I’ve discovered in the process of personalizing and occupying my new digs is this: I have way too much stuff. I know, I know, first-world problems, etc, just make a couple of Goodwill runs, maybe run some craigslist ads and/or eBay auctions, problem solved. From a perspective outside my own lived subjectivity, the problem has an easy solution.

The problem with that is that I don’t live outside my own subjectivity.

Continue reading “The Deep and Occasionally Problematic Significance of Stuff and Things” →

The Funny Thing About Preconceptions

So, about a week ago I met this guy, a friend of a guy I play soccer with, who came out to have a couple of beers with us after our game. He smelled strongly of gasoline, because he had ridden his motorcycle to the bar, and the bike had a gas leak, or maybe just a really rich mixture, and the unburnt gas had soaked into his blue jeans. The reason he had ridden the bike with the gas leak to the bar was because he’d had an accident in his van not long ago, and couldn’t drive it. After drinking about half of his giant mug of beer, he started telling the story.

The story itself wasn’t all that interesting: he’d rear-ended somebody who’d come to a (according to him) sudden stop one night. What was interesting was how utterly flabbergasted he was about the nature of the damage to his van.

He was sure the car he’d hit must have had a trailer hitch or something, because the front of his van, instead of crumpling uniformly along the axis of impact, had instead crumpled only in the middle, as if there had been a single point of impact, which made a triangular indentation in the middle. He kept saying, over and over, how he didn’t understand what had happened, and he kept clapping his hands together to demonstrate the nature of the collision. Continue reading “The Funny Thing About Preconceptions” →

A Brief Internal Dialogue

“It´s a beautiful day outside,” whispered the demon in that honey-sweet voice. “You should go outside and enjoy it. It´s not healthy to spend all your time in here, watching the world through the window.”

“I have an idea,” said the angel. “Do you want to hear about it? I think it´s really cool, and I think you´ll really like it.”

“I am an empty chasm you will never adequately fill,” said the page, staring blankly.

“All of you are right,” said the writer, and put pen to paper anyway.