Hopelessly stupid

For the life of me, I cannot comprehend WHY we do some of the stupid things we do.

Having lived more than 5 minutes, we have accumulated a virtual ton of stuff that we simply wad around from place to place over the 27 years of our married life as if it is important.

Some of it IS important in the sense that during our mortal life, it will come in handy to enjoy the life part of living. Some of it is necessary to prove that we are real people and not just part of the "Chicago political machine" who just vote early and often.

But a vast majority of it is stuff... okay, FINE, have it YOUR way... JUNK.

Junque. Treasures of trash. Tokens of passage. Reminders of a life well lived.

I'm beginning to think it's been lived a bit TOO well.

Take for example the discussion we had not two nights ago regarding the massive amounts of bed pillows we own. Or rather, which own us. It can no longer be described otherwise.

We have about 4 pillows to every man, woman, child, and dog residing in this house. Do we USE these pillows?

Unless we count my recent foot elevating unpleasantness, NO, we don't.

And the reason we don't employ them for our nocturnal positioning needs....?

Yeah, they are uncomfortable as hell because they are as old as our married life, plus or minus a couple of years and pillows here or there.

Yet we KEEP them as if they are a sacred treasure never to be parted from in this lifetime.

Vanna, can I please by some sanity???

If the pillows were the only example of this kind of asinine behavior, it could be excused as a mere trifling eccentricity... like leaving your Christmas lights hung out all year long.

But no.

We are creatures of junk. In the vast and immortal fear that grips our heart, paralyzes our mind and compels us to fill closets with crapola that we are not likely to need, want or use in this lifetime... we have become packrats to the higher good.

What good that is I have yet to discover.

We live in mortal fear that the very item we toss aside will be the very item "THAT CAN SAVE OUR LIVES!" during a crisis.

Trust me when I tell you that the pillows we have so carefully saved cannot be used as floatation devices in case this house makes a water landing. And since we've already established that they are NOT comfortable, we don't even offer them to GUESTS... but we keep them. Guilty shoved into the top of an already overstuffed closet, we keep the damn pillows as if there will never be any more pillows made for all of time and eternity.

Where has my mind fled? I miss it so very much...

Once in a great while, when I am not overcome by the physical reality of the task I'm about to undertake, I wheel our large green curbside dumpster inside to receive the treasured trash that not even the poor want to take. Honestly, I'd feel completely ashamed to put this crap in a yard sale. Almost like I should pay them to cart it away!

Since that is about as likely to happen as me discovering a vague genealogical connection to the Rockefeller's wallets, I think I'm gonna have to suck it up and start tossing things overboard just in case that water landing is in my future.

I think I'm safe in tossing my wedding dress. I have NO daughters and as lovely as it was lo these many years ago, it's hung in the back of closets and storage rooms for the 27 previously mentioned years. Dry rot has set in by now and the dress is unusable. Plus, it has SHRUNK in storage and no longer fits.

Since I'm tossing it, the matching shoes and crinoline slip can also go away.

I have a shopping bag that needs to come out of the closet and sit in my van for holding purchases. The only thing that has kept that from happening is that it is wadded into a corner underneath a few assorted paintings I did in high school. Yeah. I still have that shlock. They will be departing this week. Andy Warhol I am not and the Antiques Roadshow will make me pay them to have them throw them away.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder just how much we have that we could let go and truly never miss?

I do know one thing for sure. The pillows are going away. Far away. To the dump. And I will not miss any of them.

If that means we need to buy a few new bed pillows to fill the void, it will be money well spent. I intend to also buy the little washable covers as well. Then guests are free to use the pillows without worrying who drooled on it last.

Why are we so hopelessly stupid as to be held captive by our junk? Maybe the pioneer companies were right in limiting what they would allow the folks to pack and take toward the western skies.

A friend of mine said everyone ought to be compelled to move every couple of years just so they would learn what they could truly live without.

Like settling for ONE can opener, instead of the six that lurk in my kitchen even though only ONE of them truly works.

Someone needs to save me before they have to call those people on TV to my home to tell me 'What Kind of Fool Am I?".

Y'all have a nice night. I'm going to bed now... and sleep on a pillow that doesn't know that it's about to go to a far, far better place than it has ever known before...