I Feel Bad About My Stuff

Back on November 07, 2005, at 2:50 PM, I posted here about my little hoarding problem. I’d just learned that it was called that—hoarding. I hadn’t known. (I called the post “That Boy Jumpy Sure Can Dance” for reasons too complicated to explain.) I was mulling over a lot of things then, thinking about all my friends who all had way too much stuff, and how weird it is when someone dies and all their stuff is left behind, like a hermit crab’s shell, the carapace they constructed, the junk they lived in. I was determined to dig my way out of my own problem with stuff. [I have to add that the photo above is NOT my stuff, it's from the Fairfax County, Virginia website on hoarding.]

The first step, as always for me, was to get a book. “Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding” by David F. Tolin, Randy O. Frost, and Gail Steketee is excellent. It explains what hoarding really is, and why it happens, and has little quizzes so you can figure out why it’s happening to YOU. (It turns out that Sluggo has a problem with acquiring—like bringing home dented tins he’s picked out of the trash—and I have a problem with never getting rid of anything—like all those dented tins in the basement.) I was happy to discover that my problem wasn’t quite as bad as I’d thought, because only one of the doors leading outside is completely blocked with my junk. The authors lay out a plan of little steps to take to resolve some of the problems that underlie the bigger, more obvious hoarding problem. And, you know, I started to do them.

So now it’s, like, three years later and all that junk is still there. I haven’t actually unpacked most of the stuff that I jammed into boxes when we moved into our house 14 years ago. (Although there’s another reason for that, but I’m not allowed to say.) But I am kind of working on it more, lately. A little. And then I saw two new books today, and they made me consider the Stuff Problem again.

The first book is “Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry: Saturday, 14 February 2009, New York: Strachan & Quinn Auctioneers, New York, London, Toronto,” by Leanne Shapton. This is the kind of super-brilliant, original book I always am thrilled to see actually get produced and sold in normal bookstores. It’s a faux auction catalogue of the stuff-junk-crap owned by a fictional couple whose relationship has come to an end. There are photos and hilariously pretentious descriptions of all of it (“LOT 1279  Three spice jars full of quarters. Jars in cylindrical form. Labels read ‘Spanish Saffron,’ ‘Cinnamon Sticks,’ ‘Poppy Seed.’ Kept for tolls and parking meters in the glove compartment of Morris’s Honda. Dimensions vary. $35–75”) and as you look through everything you construct a narrative of their life together in your mind. It’s kind of icky—I mean, it’s really junk, and it looks so personal, even though it’s not real. Ack!

The other book is “Flanagan’s Smart Home,” by Barbara Flanagan, a woman who believes you need only 98 objects to furnish your entire life. She lists them, and tells you which are “best”—Environmentally best? Aesthetically best? Most practical? I don’t agree with her on everything—I will never understand why anyone would want an electric blanket, for instance—but it’s a lovely idea, living in a house with a minimum of stuff. She doesn’t include art, though. Or clothes. Or musical instruments. Or books. Or a dog. Or a big box of dented tins in the basement.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

Comments

[Neil]

http://vimeo.com/603058

[Jeff]

Ask any Fire Men what they call all that "stuff". They'll quaintly refer to it as "FUEL".

[Zelmo]

I've got fifteen books about hoarding.

[Kevin]

The problem isn't hoarding .. it's organizing what's been hoarded. Once you organize it, you become a "library", "museum", "warehouse", or "resource center".

[Leanne]

I'm always happy to see a post from the Iowa Firecracker! Best blogger on board!

[Katherine]

Here in Denver there's an art exhibit up about a man who hoardes all sortsa stuff!
http://www.belmarlab.org/ex_novick.php

[craig]

last year in chelsea, i smelled books... and rounded a corner to see men dumping wheelbarrows of books into dumpsters. i found the manager of the crew, who explained that it was a 'collyer job,' and he wouldn't let me dig through the piles due to health risks. he told me that many shelves of books were actually hollow, where rats and cockroaches had made tunnels through the rows of books! sort of like a giant habitrail in there.

so maybe now would be a good time to check out those boxes you've had piled up for 14 years!

[Dale]

I have a box of clothes I was going to take to the thrift shop and when I decided to sort through it again (why do we always second guess getting rid of stuff?) I found it was full of mouse poop and sunflower seed shells the mice brought in from my birdfeeder (basements are BAD for storage). It had to all be inspected and laundered again, and wouldn't you know it - I decided to keep that old Carhartt coat that's really way to big for me!

I think there must be an electrical action firing synapses or some chemical releasing endorphins when we look at stuff we 'collect'. The recollection of how we discovered it in a dumpster or on a flea market table for a quarter or how none of our siblings wanted it when mom and dad passed away. The memory of the boyfriend or girlfriend we had, how our youth was still in front of us, vacations spent, the music we heard at the time...

Maybe it's a consideration of value, wondering if that little zippo-style lighter that says "Made in Occupied Japan" is worth a car payment. Or maybe it's frugality - wondering if you should save that old scratched up pot you long-ago replaced in case you ever go camping (even though you don't like camping!).

Whatever it is, as long as you don't need a storage unit or pose a danger to yourself, I say don't beat yourself up too badly. When you look at something and it gives you no pleasure, that's the time to say 'Goodbye."

[bartleby]

"it might be worth something someday" is about the worst reason for keeping stuff. Since I've started procuring and selling stuff on the side I've had people ask me about the worth of numerous similar items (books) and after investigating I've found this kind of stuff, at best, keeps up with inflation.
This is doubly, triply, quintupally, infinity true about comic books. They will never exceed the value of actually growing up.

[madgardener]

Okay, I'm not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination, but what's a real challenge is being married to a hoarder. My husband is on the crying side of 50 and still has book reports from grade 8. He once told me his stuff makes him feel smart. It's just so damned claustrophobic. When my Mom died, eventhough she was a massive hoarder, it only took 2 people 5 days to sell, dispose, give away or otherwise clear out all the junk. She accumulated it over her whole life, and it amounted to other people just getting rid of it. Simply meaningless.

[Elias]

That UK TV Show "How Clean Is Your House?" is most of the times talking about hoarders and whenever I watch it I look around me for small signs of building a me museum. What particularly struck me about an episode of that series is when they asked the charming hoarder lady - "So how do you feel about your new home?" - "Great! I feel like anything can happen now! I'm thinking of the future, and future is a word I haven't used for a long time..."

[Ivy]

Here's a song by Luke Ski called "too much stuff": http://www.thefump.com/fump.php?id=1152

[chaotic kitten]

I've found the 'Buried in Treasures' book really helpful too.