The Stuff Blog Posts Are Made Of

The mind is always at work. Every single day, I am usually on automatic pilot with the repetitive tasks while my mind plots new ways to find solutions for my everyday woes. Unfortunately, my thoughts are as organized as my house. Everything is shoved into a place that was designed to be that objects container. A spare bedroom is a junk room, storage room, Santa’s Workshop, or closet for work clothes. Another closet serves as a document management repository. Two filing cabinets, tucked into the wings, serve to hold all of our bills, paychecks, savings info, and pretty much all of the user guides or instruction manuals to everything that I put together of an electronic or wooden nature. Of course, it also holds overflow from other areas. My garage was meant to hold a car, yet it is a labyrinthine of objects that have no connection to one another yet construct a path from the door to the a freezer and refrigerator that is also used for storage.

While trying to plan for my impending beach trip, I am forced to confront this state of disarray. I have to organize some stuff, buy some stuff, and pack all my stuff. I am going take a portion of my stuff to some other house for a week. I will then buy more stuff there and bring it all home to be added to this mess.

As I looked around at this mishmash of objects in different locations of my house. I immediately thought of three things, a dumpster, a match, and George Carlin. He had this whole piece on stuff that is truly a work of genius. Then man was a master of his medium. Now, while I will undoubtedly infringe on his work, I am expounding on some concepts that he introduced.

Carlin said it best. All I need a place for my stuff. A house is literally just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. My house is a huge pile of stuff with a tiny cover on it. Sometimes I’d love to throw some of my stuff out. My wife would really love to throw all of my stuff out. But she calls it shit. Just like Carlin indicated. I would love to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff like decorations that we haven’t used in years. But that is neither here nor there. Those are things that are not going to change. I am always going to have stuff and I need to find a place to put it. Sometimes, I think that I do not live in my house, my stuff does. But that’s what life is. Going from place to place with your stuff, you move around while your stuff stays at home and sits.

We are born with no stuff. We start to acquire an overwhelming amount but we are not responsible for it . Our parents, friends of parents, and other family members contribute to that pile of stuff early on leading to a diminishing organization and storage of all that stuff. The bigger we get, the smaller our toys are. We go from huge monstrosities of molded plastic held together by cheap screws that strip easily, running off of a handful of batteries to smaller, more complex devices that in essence can hold our electronic stuff. We trade the toy box for the blackberry. We go from physical representations of stuff to electronic applications and games that comprise our stuff. Where do you keep your addresses? Where do you play most of your games? It’s a pile of stuff with a cover on it.

We move from toy box to pencil box. Now our stuff is mobile. We can take it with us. Sure, it’s not exactly fun stuff, but it can create fun stuff. Soon we graduate from pencil box to locker. Now, we must be acquiring some good stuff, because now we have a lock on it. This stuff must be important. Then we break down that locked up stuff into a smaller container to go with us. It’s our homework or schedule or whatever else we carry throughout our day. I can’t believe that I managed to survive this long leaving a turkey sandwich, with mayonnaise and cheese no less, in my locker, unrefrigerated for four hours before eating it. How did I not end up with salmonella?

Once we reach a certain age, we move on from a small metal box of stuff to a large metal box of stuff…on wheels. Yes, once we are old enough to drive we obtain a rolling cover for some of our stuff. It holds tapes, CDs, books, clothes, maps, papers, and money. It goes with us and then we stop, take some stuff out and go somewhere else.

College? A larger place for your stuff. I stayed in the dorms for my entire collegiate career. Why? Because all I needed was a place for my stuff. Seriously. I had a TV, VCR, PC, Radio, books, magazines, refrigerator, hot pot, CDs, tapes, Food, clothes, bed, chair, bookcase, cabinet, and dresser all contained in a little pie shaped stuff holder. My stuff sat in one place and the rest of the campus was where I lived. There was no need for an apartment that was overpriced and probably in violation of several building codes. I want my stuff to be safe from the elements and intruders.

We graduate and sometimes move back into our original stuff holder, Mom and Dad’s! I get a call every now and then from my Mom telling me she’s going to get rid of the stuff from my childhood. There is a ton of stuff in our garage that is labeled, “Yard Sale.” That’s a name we give to stuff that we no longer want, but never get around to unloading. We always make plans to have a Yard Sale but that’s a euphemism for being a pack rat. It deflects the problem because it may go away some day.

Then we migrate some of our stuff into our car, again, to try and find a good job so we can buy more stuff or at least more expensive stuff. We get a computer that holds a lot of our stuff like resumes and contacts. We go online to social networks and we create email accounts. That all becomes containers for our stuff. Hell, this blog is just a place for all the inane and weird stuff that is in my head. I’m trying to get it out of there to make room for more important stuff. Maybe, one day, I can put it all together and have someone get a red pen out and fix it so I can write a book. Perhaps, you will have a copy of my stuff sitting on or next to your stuff in your home. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Then we buy that house or rent that apartment and try and fit all of our physical stuff from our various containers into one place. Eventually there is no room for us. So, we look into buying a bigger place, not get rid of stuff. We move and acquire more stuff that we need to complete the rooms in our new place for our stuff. We add those children I talked about and their stuff. We get pets and of course, they have to have stuff. Often, my cats tend to take my stuff and treat it as their own. My daughter hides my stuff when I’m not paying attention. Usually, it’s the phone of remote that goes missing.

One day, I may be able to get a bigger cover for my stuff. If I had my choice, I would build instead of buy. Why? Because I want to make sure there is room for my stuff. I want to allow for the acquisition of more stuff, and as I take a tractor trailer sized wide turn back around to my original point, I want better organization of all my stuff. After all, that is what I do for a living. I organize and hold other people’s stuff. That stuff is knowledge. It’s all electronic and it lives in one place. We managed to get rid of a lot of the paper stuff. It gets old and outdated and not everyone has access to it. We find the need to lock down those important items and we also make sure that our stuff is approved. With that in mind, I need to make sure that where I go next, I have a place for my stuff and it’s appropriately organized.

I would love to get rid of all of that paper that resides in those filing cabinets. I think that a Kindle type device would work well in a document management type setting. If I were smart enough to configure a system in my home to house all of my important documents, then I could probably use something like a Kindle to retrieve those documents when needed. Say I am working out in the garage and I have to find the instructions for some tool or project I’m working on. Instead of rifling through my cabinet or travelling back and forth from my desktop computer to the location I’m working at, I can just grab the Kindle and call up that document. Better yet, what if my wife is cooking and she needs a recipe? Instead of sifting through all of them, she can locate them by using this hand held device that can be propped up like a cookbook. On the phone with a utility or other service like insurance. Call up your last bill or medical records. Now, of course, you would need a backup of all this stuff. If there’s a power outage or something crashes, you would need to get to this stuff. But a backup copy still takes up less space. You could even box up all the other stuff and store it in a smaller container instead of a huge filing cabinet. You would always be able to get to your stuff. These are of course all pipe dreams because the initiative to do those things take time and money, which is stuff I don’t have.

If you stop and think about it, you literally have stuff everywhere. Your stuff is all over the planet. That online account I spoke of. It’s probably housing your stuff in a server overseas somewhere. You have little containers of stuff scattered about the Earth like a trail of Matryoshka Dolls. One set of stuff breaks down into smaller containers of the original. Our house becomes our car, which becomes our purses or back packs, which then becomes our wallets, and then our pockets.

When we die, most of our stuff finally leaves our possession. I inherited stuff, that is in my house, from relatives, who died. My poor kid(s) will eventually have to go through my stuff and decide to keep, sell, throw out, or God forbid, mark “Yard Sale.” Some people take some of their stuff with them. People put little trinkets and remembrances of our lives in a casket with us. If we decide to get cremated, someone will either scatter our ashes or keep us in an urn. Thus, we become stuff that gets put together with other people’s stuff.

I don’t know about you but that’s some scary stuff there.

Behind The Red Room Door

In my house there is a room of complete and utter chaos. The laws of physics do not apply. It is a room where objects disappear into another dimension, only to reappear months later. Mystical forces block memory of leaving objects here. This place, this unearthly place has no basis in reality. Its location can shift overtime, occupying different areas of a home. As for now, its blood red carpet chills the spine. The shapes and figures that adorn the walls mock you when you enter. Abandon all hope for this is the red room and it is the dumping ground for everything which has no other place.

No, this isn't the Twilight Zone and it's not Twin Peaks. This is the spare bedroom in my house. It was a kid's bedroom that had ugly red carpet and wallpaper depicting baby Disney characters in all manner of bedtime preparation. On occasion, when we can clean it up, it serves as a guest bedroom but for now, it's pretty much storage for all sorts of junk that have no place anywhere else in the house. It also serves as a closet for all my clothes and a ready room for me in the morning so I don't wake my wife. It's nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, a lot of people probably have a 'stuff' room in their house. It's the room no one ever sees. The one door that always remains closed when company comes to visit.

My parents had one. It was my brother's bedroom after he moved out. The once sparse room now contained all manner of plants and packages to be wrapped for Christmas. My wife's parents have one. It was their eldest daughter's room. At one point, it held their old Macintosh computer and two recliners. My wife's parents would watch television in that room while we occupied the downstairs. Eventually, it shifted to other rooms of the house as they found the need to have an extra bedroom available. I used to have two. No, I'm not rich, just disorganized. But with the birth of my daughter, I needed a nursery. So, I had to downsize to just one. But let's talk humble beginnings.

I didn't always have a 'stuff' room. My first apartment did not have a 'junk' room; therefore everything I had was stuff. It was the George Carlin rule. "Your stuff is shit. My shit is stuff. Get your shit out of here. I need a place for my stuff." I also did not have anything in great quantities that could be construed as miscellaneous. All my worldly possessions at that point resided in one of the many rooms in my Dad's office building. Short of holding a vintage complete with a jar containing the head of Benjamin Raspail (a.k.a. Miss Hester Moffet), there was all manner of 'stuff' housed at the office. There was the custom made headboard from my college dorm, a Domino's Pizza thermal bag, various books, and two round table tops and bar stools. There was no way I could these items in my current living space, but when I moved into a bigger townhouse, I began to accrue more stuff. Now, my spare bedroom became a stuff room. It contained all of my Christmas and Halloween decorations in the closet, my monster entertainment center that no longer fit anywhere else, a futon, the litter box for the cats, all my records (not music), and various nick knacks that no longer had a place among the regular everyday ones. During this time, I was planning a wedding and could not fathom getting a whole lot of new 'stuff' from guests since I had no place for more of my current 'stuff.'

At that point, my then fiancée decided to buy a house so that we didn't have to move so much stuff. When we moved in brought all my 'current stuff' with me as well as the 'old stuff' from the office and my wife's stuff. We stacked everything from floor to ceiling in both extra bedrooms. Each had an odd theme. We called one the 'Pooh Room' since it was painted in Pink and Yellow on opposite walls. The other was a horribly designed kids' bedroom we dubbed the 'Red Room' from the carpet and wallpaper. Both of these rooms also had to hold bedroom furniture since we brought those from our respective homes as well.

My introduction to the Red Room describes as a place where objects disappear. I simply mean that anything that can not be found was usually located in the red room. However, at one point during our engagement, my wife lost her ring. Her friend had come over to help color her hair and hoping to not get any color or chemicals on her ring she removed it and forgot where she had left it. Usually, I have an uncanny knack for locating lost items in my house as long as I know where it was seen last. I can deduce the final location based on movement and tasks completed after said item was last seen. It's the equivalent to a contact wearer dropping one of their lenses and always looking in the weirdest of places to find it, whether it be the side of the vanity countertop or the back of the underside of the faucet. Since my wife had no recollection on when or where she had seen it last I had no basis on which to mount my search. Sickened to her stomach, she agonized for days over where it could have gone. I asked her if it was possible that she threw it away. Her uncertainty gave me pause. It was late in the week, so I would have a large amount of trash to sift through in order to declare it not there. But, I did. After cleaning up, she continued to fret over the ring as we only had six months before our wedding. She was puzzled at my lack of worry. I told her that with all the things that had to be done before our wedding, I couldn't worry about this one thing. It wasn't in the garbage and you last saw it while in the house. It had to be somewhere and we would find it when we stopped looking for it. In all probability it was where I originally figured it would be, the Red Room. She did not remember leaving it there and the room was a disaster as it was. Although, I refrained from giving her more grief by stating that perhaps one of our cats had eaten it, but since I did the litters, eventually it would appear, if that were the case. My wife's continual bewilderment at my lack of fear of losing items in my house is only matched by the track record of finding said items when I quit looking for them, though not all were found in the Red Room.

Every so often, over the course of the next few months, I would take a spin around the house and check in unusual places for the ring, but never did I locate it. About a month prior to the wedding we began shuffling stuff from the 'stuff' rooms in order to have space available for out of town guests attending our wedding. While the mattress and box spring for my wife's old bedroom suit were located in the 'Pooh Room,' the frame was stacked in the 'Red Room.' Again, the nature of the 'stuff' room is that there is no logical order to what is kept there. While moving the folded up metal bed frame I heard a tinkling noise that didn't sound like it belonged. Then, there was the dull sound of a small object hitting the carpet floor. Among the blood red sea of shag pile lay a bright shiny metallic object. It was the ring. The interdimensional doorway had reopened and deposited the ring into the folded up bed frame just in time for the wedding.

This was, of course, the only explanation because there was no way my wife would have purposely put the ring in between the folds of the frame. I surprised her with the find, asking her to marry me all over again. She, at first, assumed that I had bought another ring, but that was not the case. I asked her if she remembered taking her ring off in the 'Red Room' before coloring her hair. She suddenly recalled being draped with a towel and adorned in foil and thinking that she better take off the ring. Her and her friend had been looking at her in the mirror on top of the dresser when this thought occurred. She then took the ring and placed it on the window sill of that room where it must have fallen down off the window sill and into the frame. She could neither remember taking it off or being in that room until this point. The 'Red Room' cast a spell of amnesia on her before taking the shiny jeweled object.

From then on we tried to do our best not to go into the 'Red Room' with any thing of value. In the last year we have managed to discard or organize the bulk of our 'stuff' as to alleviate the contents of our 'stuff' room. One motivational factor was the first birthday of our daughter this July. Again, an out of town friend was visiting and since the other room was now a nursery, we needed a useable bedroom. We worked long weekend hours to clear out both our primary 'stuff' room and our secondary 'stuff' room, our garage. In the case of inclement weather threatening our picnic, we would bring tables and chairs into our garage to house guests.

Granted, both rooms still house an amazing amount of 'stuff' that needs to go somewhere else. I hope that by this time next year, this 'stuff' has found a more permanent home, either in the dumpster, another room, or the 'Room of Abandonment.' That's my attic and it has a lot of 'stuff' that makes appearances throughout the year and it is a pain in the ass to get it. I need to get rid of a lot of stuff.