A Place For My Stuff

The Awesome Boyfriend and I have taken to watching "American Pickers" on The History Channel. It's pretty entertaining as we, the viewing audience, are introduced to folks and neighborhoods and sheds and buildings as the two main hosts wade through piles and piles of "stuff" looking for things they can sell or restore or add to THEIR collections.

There are various shows like this - "Pawn Stars" springs to mind, as does "Antique Road Show" - but this one is different in that we see the owners of said "stuff" in their own environment. Sometimes it's a very neat, very orderly collection (which the hosts don't tend to enjoy much because the chances for buying things from a neat collection tends to be slim) but more often than not, it's the back building with the door that doesn't quite really open and the lock that rusted off during that snowstorm in '73 and, when the camera is finally able to get through, it looks like what it is ... a bunch of crap that was maybe at one time a treasured collection that has since gone neglected.

Which, in a strange route of thinking, lead me to think of this space. I use this space for a number of things but, first and foremost, it's entertainment for me. That's why there are music videos and pictures of cats and memories of cars and stories of dogs and descriptions of food and random news stories ... and that's just what I've hit the "Publish Post" button on. In the "Drafts" area, I have dribs and drabs, rants and ravings, stories half-written and memories semi-described ... all sitting waiting to be discarded or finished.

And, like those folks we meet in "American Pickers", I'm faced with the question of "why don't you finish this or discard it now?" Sometimes it's in draft stage because the topic isn't fully-formed in my head, sometimes the stuff I've written isn't clear enough as I re-read it to make much sense, sometimes the appropriate moment has passed, and a lot of times I just wanted to write it out so that I didn't have to think on it anymore. (That last one tends to be mostly of the "rant" category.)

I think that a lot of the population does something like this, either with ideas or memories or lessons learned or actual, physical things. We hold onto those pieces ... to our "stuff" ... because we're not done with our collection yet, in one way or another. And, at some point, there will be a time, a place, a person, or an event that lets us know we need to decide if we're keeping it or letting it go.