Simplicity is hard. Let’s go shopping! [dive into mark]
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to get rid of things in my apartment that I don’t need anymore. The problem is, most of it is stuff that I’m pretty sure no one else needs, either, just junk that I have accumulated over the past 10 years. I don’t want to just throw it away, I just want it to disappear. I would pay for someone to come over to my house and weed out all the unimportant crap, as long as they assure me it won’t just end up in a landfill.
Several times during 2009 when I left town on vacation, I would look at all I had with me at the time (usually just a rolling carry-on of clothes, my netbook and a camera) and thought, “this is everything I need right now, no more, no less”. I actually regretted having to return to my house full of crap to confront everything I don’t need again.
There was even a time when I was in New York and got a call from my landlord, asking why the fire dept. was at our building. I said I didn’t know, I was in NYC, and he said, opps, sorry, I’ll call you back when I know more. For a couple of hours, I pondered the possibility of having lost everything in a fire, and was horrified at first, but after a while, felt sort of liberated. Sure, it would be pain to replace my social security card and passport, and I would lose all my film negatives from when I used to actually shoot film, but other than those items, I really wouldn’t miss much. I worried that this might mean I’m unsentimental, but came to the conclusion that really, I am sentimental about people and places, not things. I had almost made peace with this when I got word from my landlord that it was just a fire alarm test. I was almost disappointed.
I just want to start over again, in so many ways.
