the perils of packing like rats
here's the main problem with being a pack rat.
you are wandering around your room, intermittenly reading oh, say, Ubiquity, and you notice your nightstand's drawer is slightly opened. and you remember that this morning you had to open it because you dropped your earring into it in a rush to get ready for work. so you casually put ubiquity down and you open the drawer and see a stack of pictures just sitting there, swelling up to meet you. so you pick up the first ten or so and you realize they are pictures of your trip to london, england in the spring of 1999. your hair is long. and the black dye in it reflects the march morning sunlight as you stand next to karl marx's grave in some outlying cemetery. and you are 23. and you still believe certain things and that explains the slow smile on your face. you remember that you are hungover in this photo. you remember that you still wrote poetry in this photo and that you felt slightly more significant, slightly more arrogant than your life actually merited at 23 or even now, however old you are. and then after shuffling through assorted, odd, hopeful photos of yourself in repose, in poses, drunk, high, brimming with everything you've since lost, you notice that underneath the swollen pile of photos are your old journals. being a pack rat, you have saved nearly all of them. so you open the top one and hearing the slight creak you remember that this journal was a gift from a russian kid from brooklyn who was once 18 and had an insane notion that he'd make a living doing fine art. he gave you this journal after he kissed you inside the big corner booth of the slaughtered lamb and felt like he owed you something for either your saliva or the fact that he didn't want any more. and the entry it opens to is dated 8/31/00 and you remember washington heights and the gw bridge. you remember the sound of the west side highway underneath your fifth floor walk up. you remember roaches and charging beer and being a book selling, goth dressing, chain smoking romantic holed up in your room most of the time or doing inexplicably ridiculous things like throwing up in taxis. the top of the 8/31/00 entry is a crude drawing you did to illustrate your text. it's a stick figure you wearing a frown and trapped inside a huge dollar bill. the two bars in the dollar bill sign, your jail. you laugh for a solid 20 minutes at this and then you laugh even more when you realize you could have easily written the same entry today, not five years ago. then you start to cry a bit because you realize that your life passes by and nothing really changes. but you aren't crying about that. you are crying that that idea, that notion does not comfort you when you really think that it should. then you read some more of your life at 23 and you close the book and you have a headache and you regret a whole bunch of fucking shit, not the least of which is being a pack rat and saving records of things...the forgetting of which would have made you feel much better.
so you see, today's lesson is this: throw old shit out.
you are wandering around your room, intermittenly reading oh, say, Ubiquity, and you notice your nightstand's drawer is slightly opened. and you remember that this morning you had to open it because you dropped your earring into it in a rush to get ready for work. so you casually put ubiquity down and you open the drawer and see a stack of pictures just sitting there, swelling up to meet you. so you pick up the first ten or so and you realize they are pictures of your trip to london, england in the spring of 1999. your hair is long. and the black dye in it reflects the march morning sunlight as you stand next to karl marx's grave in some outlying cemetery. and you are 23. and you still believe certain things and that explains the slow smile on your face. you remember that you are hungover in this photo. you remember that you still wrote poetry in this photo and that you felt slightly more significant, slightly more arrogant than your life actually merited at 23 or even now, however old you are. and then after shuffling through assorted, odd, hopeful photos of yourself in repose, in poses, drunk, high, brimming with everything you've since lost, you notice that underneath the swollen pile of photos are your old journals. being a pack rat, you have saved nearly all of them. so you open the top one and hearing the slight creak you remember that this journal was a gift from a russian kid from brooklyn who was once 18 and had an insane notion that he'd make a living doing fine art. he gave you this journal after he kissed you inside the big corner booth of the slaughtered lamb and felt like he owed you something for either your saliva or the fact that he didn't want any more. and the entry it opens to is dated 8/31/00 and you remember washington heights and the gw bridge. you remember the sound of the west side highway underneath your fifth floor walk up. you remember roaches and charging beer and being a book selling, goth dressing, chain smoking romantic holed up in your room most of the time or doing inexplicably ridiculous things like throwing up in taxis. the top of the 8/31/00 entry is a crude drawing you did to illustrate your text. it's a stick figure you wearing a frown and trapped inside a huge dollar bill. the two bars in the dollar bill sign, your jail. you laugh for a solid 20 minutes at this and then you laugh even more when you realize you could have easily written the same entry today, not five years ago. then you start to cry a bit because you realize that your life passes by and nothing really changes. but you aren't crying about that. you are crying that that idea, that notion does not comfort you when you really think that it should. then you read some more of your life at 23 and you close the book and you have a headache and you regret a whole bunch of fucking shit, not the least of which is being a pack rat and saving records of things...the forgetting of which would have made you feel much better.
so you see, today's lesson is this: throw old shit out.