holy crap!...

recently i spent a few hours helping out a friend accepting donated items for a fundraising garage sale...

what a bunch of crap...well, maybe not all of it...some people were very generous in their donations, and i did get some cute baby clothes for the goddess mother, and the kids got a few cool things (all for free i might add so who am i to complain?)...but really, the majority of the stuff people brought in at once was utterly appalling and strangely fascinating...and crap...

especially the items brought in by people who were obviously very proud of their donations and had a bit of a hard time letting go of them...i have to say some of those were the worst of the lot...

it's interesting what people keep and value...what people keep and pack away to help them forget or remember or for whatever reason...i doubt i will soon forget the three foot tall box of what seemed to be twenty years worth of well used fanny packs, sweat stained visors, and dirty worn out size 13 golf shoes...

i myself am not immune from this...and while i don't have secret stashes of fanny packs and visors, i have plenty of boxes of my own crap...so i understand the attachment we humans have for our stuff...our hesitancy to get rid of something we may need or use or want again...but however i dispose of my crap (IF i dispose of it at all!), i have come to the conclusion that there is no way in h-e double hockey sticks am i ever gonna give another human free reign to ogle and judge my stuff!!!...it's anonymously donated or not at all...

it's embarrassing enough for me to go through it!...

and the worst part is i have a lot of it...more than a lot...i have several boxes in my basement labeled "crap", "crap", "the lord of the ring's crap", "sillymortalmama's crap", and i kid you not three boxes of my former betrothed's crap labeled "my former betrothed's crap"...

and those are the packed up and labeled boxes!...i have bags, boxes, and baskets that are just filled to the rim, still crap, just unlabeled as such...they too are stashed in the basement and in all the closets, too...

and every once in awhile i drift through, gathering things up to get rid of, but then just stick them in the basement...in bags marked, "give away stuff"...so it's still all here, and i really haven't gotten rid of a thing, just rearranged it a little...

just for *fun* i found a box full of stuff to look through it...talk about a bunch of crap...i found a very ugly watch that as far as i know i never wore and never even worked, a pair of godawful white shoes i wore to the goddess mother's wedding, something oval shaped and dried up and yet strangely sticky, and an eight year old issue of parenting magazine addressed to someone i don't know in san francisco...

and that's just the beginning...there were dried out markers, broken pencils, and old, unused, dated christmas cards...there were three romance novels with no covers, two copies of the same leo buscaglia book, two unmarked cassette tapes and a gumball machine bracelet that a little girl gave me in el paso, texas...there was a pile of pennies, they too were sticky, and a couple of old stamps...there was an old canceled check and a folded and yellowing piece of paper with a poem that i wrote that was neither well written nor particularly flattering to whom the poem was written about...(and damn if i know who now, must be at least ten years old)...

i sat there for so long looking over this stuff and wondering what possessed me to keep any of it...and this was a relatively small box, too...i can just imagine what the others hold...and that's just my stuff...the lord of the ring is even worse going through his stuff...he looks at every item, very intently, unfolding each piece of paper carefully and opening each old envelope...a shoebox of items could keep the man out of circulation for a week...

i'd like to be one of those people that just finds a box and tosses it, no looking through it, no looking back...outta here, gone, space freed up in house and mind...

but i just can't...i just can't toss a single box, bag, or basket without going through it first...examining the contents just to be sure there isn't something worth saving...i think that somewhere in all that stuff i might just find my little sister's favorite book lost long ago, or the diary i kept when i was little, or my high school yearbooks, or that pink radio i was obsessed with and thought i'd never get, only to open it the morning of my fourteenth birthday...

for now i haven't found one thing worth keeping, and i'm not holding my breath...(well at least until i look through the old purse i abandoned in late winter to make sure there isn't anything i need to save...i am definitely holding my breath for that one because i can smell it from here and it's in the next room)...

x.