The Chuck Barris Conundrum*

I will not watch “Hoarders” on A&E for fear of finding myself in someone else's clutter. 

I have spent a lifetime surrounded by stuff.  As a child, it was Matchbox cars and Star Wars figures. I had specific tastes, and I played with my toys.  They weren’t for ziplocking in plastic bags.  They were the primer cord and powder of a fertile imagination, and I used them up in many cases.  

In my young adulthood, the stuff of choice became books.  Walls of paperbacks.  The greats of science fiction and fantasy.  Star Trek.  Doc Savage.  The occasional mystery, quiz books, trivia books, making-of books for TV series and movies, weird but true stories, on and on. I fed my habit on weekly spins through the used book stores of Catskill and, once I could drive, Hudson and Saugerties and Albany and Kingston and everywhere in between.

Let's not even get into music.  My couple hundred albums were easily and quickly surpassed in the digital age.  I stopped counting at 1,500 CDs a couple of years ago.

If my room was an Oreo, it'd be a Triple Stuff.

None of this is intrinsically bad.  But I've also rarely culled any of the herd.  The Matchbox cars are still here.  Boxes of baseball cards.  The Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em robots.  The Star Wars figures.  Three boxes of knickknacks, baubles, interesting little bits that serve no purpose save for having been a neat pickup, an oddity – cool stuff.  The Etch-a-sketch key chain is trumped only by the Lincoln Logs key chain that resides in the same shoebox I haven't opened in the last year. 

The memory of moving 43 boxes of books four years ago is still very fresh.  Carrying them one by one up three flights of stairs will do that.  And herein lies the quandary I have with my stuff: smart money says that before the end of the year, I will need to box and ready all of this stuff to move again.  There's no guarantee of space for it on the other end of a move.  The question becomes, why?  Aside from nostalgia, is there any reason to hold on to five cases of Matchbox cars?  A milk crate full of laserdiscs? (Think DVD, but the size of an LP record; and if you don’t know what an LP record is, ask your mom.)  The remaining records and 45 singles?      

Some of these things surely have a value to someone, somewhere.  I have a heap of college loans and other debt I could be paying down.  I could severely reduce the level of stuff spilling across the shelves, from the closet, from under the bed.  Ebay and Craigslist are crammed with people looking for bargains – why not give them some in that big yard sale circle of life? 

I know any move is going to require a truck - writing makes its own hernia with files and what not - but I dream of traveling light, a few boxes of the best books, my music taking up a small space on my desk as opposed to seventeen shelves and three small crates, a closet I can stand in.

And still, I feel handcuffed when I think of liquidating touchstones from my life and times.  One simple, overriding cry echos from the depths of my Indiana Jones-style government warehouse, the headspace that comes from growing up in a family of collectors, a declaration that keeps me from a purge that would make a neighborhood tag sale quake with envy:

But it’s my STUFF.

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* Chuck Barris used to go to commercial on "The Gong Show" promising to be back with "more STUFF" after the break.  Apparently there's a lot of Stuff in my mental attic too...