Too Much Stuff

Well, it's Saturday evening, the sun is going down, and I'm sitting here at one of my main hangouts, Starbucks on Meridian and Willow. It’s close to my camp and Safeway (where I do most of my food shopping). The crew here at Starbucks, the evening shift, are friendly, sociable and kind and generous with their work.

I came by here earlier in the day after sleeping way too much, (had to bust a move and have a cup of coffee) and decided to go back to my camp to clean up a bit and locate my adapter cord to charge my DVD player, which is nice to have for various types of movies. As I was at my camp looking around, trying to sort my laundry and pick up garbage, I noticed that my space has gotten smaller. It makes it uncomfortable for me to move around. The bottom line: I have too much stuff.

Last week, I skipped over doing laundry, because of my bike situation. In other words, I haven’t done laundry for two weeks, and 99 percent of my clothes are dirty, and it takes two large heavy bags to put them in. Normally I have one huge bag to muscle down to the laundromat, which is fine, but two big bags is way too much.

So Tuesday, when it’s 75 cents a load, I will haul one over-sized bag to do laundry, no matter what.

You see, every Sunday evening I shop at Goodwill. It’s not like but there’s always good stuff. I shop at Goodwill and end up getting more clothes than I originally set out to buy. I bought some medium-size briefs thinking that they would fit, and they were much too tight. This is no good. Not that anybody would notice, but I know, and that’s good enough. I tried stretching them, but somehow they contract back to that stiff, unforgiving size.

Socks, well, you know socks. They somehow split up and leave you with size, pattern and color variations to deal with when you are trying to match up the best you can. It's funny when I do laundry. I just throw them in a bag knowing that a lot of their mates are missing, and I don’t want to be embarrassed by trying to match two with a decent looking pair. I’m sure everybody has had this small problem at some time or another. At the campsite, it’s much easier to lose one with all the other stuff you have, especially when it’s not all organized.

It's hard to be totally organized, because I don’t like to be standing totally upright too much, because people are going by on the bike trail and would notice me. The secret to camping out is not to be noticed as much as possible, because it's totally still not legal to camp out, although now people are more tolerable and understanding of why you’re there.

I mean, I’m not putting a mailbox or welcome mat out to designate my existence. Tomorrow, I’m not going on a shopping spree of clothes, because I’ve got too much stuff, and right now I must weed out things that I don’t wear or that are old or stained or whatever.

I also have about four sweatshirts with hoods, three winter jackets and a couple of London fog-type raincoats and a few sweaters. So when Mother Nature throws her cold and rain upon us, I will be ready to deal with it. The whole trick to survival in the winter months is that you have the right apparel and keep it dry as possible. ...

I used to have a storage unit for more than a year and a half. I would go there, being homeless, I remind you, slide it open and look at a lot of stuff, too much stuff for my situation, and with limited funds and no known date of getting a place to put my stuff, the storage unit and the $70 a month had to come to an end. I managed to sell and give away about half of my stuff. The rest of my stuff, I was forced to leave at the storage facility to deal with.

Everybody has this "Too Much Stuff Syndrome." If you have a house, if you’re garage is full, there’s too much stuff, and you get a storage unit OR have a few garage sales to rid your life of a lot of stuff you consider junk. If you rent an apartment, with perhaps a cabinet in the garage, and the few storage spaces within your apartment, you generally find you have too much stuff. If you rent a room, you’d be lucky to find enough space for your stuff. And if you’re a pack rat, you always have this problem and condition.

It’s hard for some people to cut loose with some of their things, whether they need them or use them. My mother had a thing about wrapping paper and bows and things. She had two big boxes of such materials and had too much stuff in that category. For others, it could be clothes, books, old record albums, family heirlooms or furniture or whatever, but most of this problem is being in denial of having too much stuff. The best way to get rid of your “too much stuff” is to take it to Good Will, the Salvation Army or some kind of organization that will use them in a good way.

When I recycle sometimes, I run across things in the garbage, which are perfectly good and should not be there. The worse things about having too much stuff is that people are too lazy or thoughtless to make the small effort to put it into the proper place, rather than in a landfill where it will be buried forever.

Reusable things or recyclable things have to be paid more attention to. Recycling and renewable energy is a must for the good of our children and our planet. Frankly, I think half the population on this planet is unplanned children. Birth control may not seem right, but the human race does not breed like most animals. On this planet, mankind is so overwhelmed with sex they forget about the possibility of the creation of a child to live a life on this earth; most are not given a good start on growing up and having a normal lifestyle.

This god, a god, that so many people have faith in, had too much stuff and is still attending to it—after all, he or she created it, and the last I heard, there’s a lot of stuff out there in the universe.

There must be a storage galaxy somewhere out there. I think god realized he created a monster and won’t be back to correct it any time. After all, the dinosaurs had it going on for 30 million years; not bad. We won’t make it past 500,000 years, if that. One thing for sure, if there’s a heaven or hell or some magical place, you will always be part of the earth forever, which has too much stuff.

The opinions expressed here are the blogger's and not necessarily those of the local editor's or anyone affiliated with Patch.