We got this on Friday, a 40-yard container from the local trash hauler. Err, excuse me, solid waste management company. Why? Because we've collected so much crap over the years the sheer quantity of it daunts me. I think about engaging in large-scale clutter removal, and I am defeated by the sheer scale of the job. Just cleaning the junk out of the garage would take several trips to the landfill, and I personally don't care for the way the local landfill is managed. The ground guides are generally absent, it's hard to see the hand signals from the guy in the dozer or the water wagon, and I don't think they do a very good job of maintaining the dumping apron. It's rough, uneven, heavily rutted... The last time I went there were these ridiculous dozer scars running across the apron that were almost deep enough to get a conventional pickup truck stuck, and I personally would have been embarrassed to leave such a mess in my wake if I had been the dozer operator.But the dumpster deals with all of these issues. It's HUGE. I don't have to deal with conflicting or enigmatic hand signals from people I can hardly see. There's no getting stuck (though I did run my "motorized wheelbarrow", a lawn tractor with a little dump trailer, out of gas while hauling stuff to it).
So I've gotten a bunch of junk cleaned out of the garage, removed a large amount of spider habitat, and discarded about a 20-year accumulating of scale modeling junk. It was stuff that I always intended to get to, but never actually seemed to. My theory is that if I haven't touched the stuff in two or three years, chances are I don't even miss it. And so far I don't.
Tomorrow I propose to get some gasoline and get my motorized wheelbarrow going again so I can get rid of some of the heavier stuff - an old desk, old bales of hay, broken pallets. I have the dumpster till Saturday and I expect that I'll run out of time before I run out of space in the dumpster.
I've been in a mood to declutter for a while, but a friend of mine recently wondered if I wasn't motivated by something else - that is, the desire to reduce my accumulation of useless junk so that if the worst outcome of my cancer comes to pass, I won't leave my family with the task of throwing out a mountain of my meaningless personal junk. It's an interesting theory, and I can't say it's actually wrong, because the thought has gone through my head a time or two. Or three.
So it's food for thought. But I see it this way. The most likely result is that I'll be fine and I'll still be around in fifteen years, in which case the massive decluttering is just that, an attempt to clean up and simplify life. And if the worst happens, well, I feel a little more ready for it. Either way, it's worthwhile, even though I choose to dwell on the former rather than the latter.
3 comments:
There must be something in the air. A friend of mine is moving from LA to New Mexico and has just discovered, to her mortification, how much *stuff* she has. Another informs me that professional movers call all that *stuff* chowder. She added: "Chowder can kill you."
On the other hand, my 80-year-old mother just informed me that she's not clearing out anything and I'll have to deal with it, to which I replied, "When you're flying up to heaven, don't look down at your house unless you want to see a big ol' dumpster out in the driveway."
I wish these things in the air would infect me during the winter. Though I'm much stronger than I was during chemo, I still find that the temperature (114 or so) saps me considerably. It seems that every one of my major projects starts in mid-July, and you'd think that after thirty-odd years of living in the desert, I'd learn my lesson.
Chowder. I like that. I tend to refer to such oddly assorted stuff as "schmutz" but I think that's actually incorrect Yiddish. Henceforth, my schmutz is now chowder. Or, as they say in Hyannisport, chowdah.
I think the "chowder" description comes from the fact that it's made up of a bunch of little bits and pieces of stuff. 114 would put me on the couch with the fan blowing right in my face. I have no tolerance for heat. You're a better man than I am.
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