Piecemeal.
Because this tiny 2 BD apartment isn't big enough to hold alll my stuff! So...
One load of boxes at a time. Up 3 flights of stairs. Panting. Sweaty.
Sitting, going through things I've been carrying from one place to another, cross-country, unseen artifacts from ...my entire life. A box of baby shoes, hard as rocks. Endless, meaningless pictures.
Journals and diaries. Letters. More meaningless pictures to throw away.
(I remember living in "The Wimbleton"(?) apts in downtown Portland, OR, 2004.
I forget the name. Some tennis themed name. Shared bathroom down the hall that was always resplendent in filth and used hypodermics. Once, someone, I swear it wasn't me but it really was, took a shit in the hallway because the bathroom was being used as a shooting gallery for hours.
Anyways.
This place:
...and taking out the trash one day and in the trash dumpster, behind the building, with all the trash and coffee grounds, box after box of someone's memories. Black and white pictures. Letters. In the trash.
Someone had died and there were the contents of their lives. In the trash. A lifetime of nostalgia. On it's way to the landfill. ((And my grandmother on my dad's side, talking about how one of her friends had died and they used shovels to clean out her house.)))
So...ruthless censor of myself / mystuff. "Would I even miss this?" Into the trash it goes.
But going through the stuff...is...
By turns depressing and endearing. So many bridges burnt. Rebuilt. Reburnt. Rebuildt. Reburnt. Until the person was no longer willing to accept me as an acquaintance ...or whatever. (We're talking most of my friends through life, here!)
“Men of every kind have their characteristics, their features, their virtues and vices and their deadly sins. Prowling about at night was one of the Steppenwolf’s favorite tendencies. The morning was a wretched time of day for him. He feared it and it never brought him any good. On no morning of his life had he ever been in good spirits nor done any good before midday, nor ever had a happy idea, nor devised any pleasure for himself or others. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and became alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he productive, active and, sometimes, aglow with joy. With this was bound up his need for loneliness and independence. There was never a man with a deeper and more passionate craving for independence than he. In his youth when he was poor and had difficulty in earning his bread, he preferred to go hungry and in torn clothes rather than endanger his narrow limit of independence. He never sold himself for money or an easy life or to women or to those in power; and had thrown away a hundred times what in the world’s eyes was his advantage and happiness in order to safeguard his liberty. No prospect was more hateful and distasteful to him than that he should have to go to an office and conform to daily and yearly routine and obey others. He hated all kinds of offices, governmental or commercial, as he hated death, and his worst nightmare was confinement in barracks. He contrived, often at great sacrifice, to avoid all such predicaments. It was here that his strength and his virtue rested. On this point he could neither be bent nor bribed. Here his character was firm and indeflectable. Only, through this virtue, he was bound the closer to his destiny of suffering. *It happened to him as it does to all; what he strove for with the deepest and most stubborn instinct of his being fell to his lot, but more than is good for men. In the beginning his dream and his happiness, in the end it was his bitter fate. The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. He achieved his aim. He was ever more independent. He took orders from no man and ordered his ways to suit no man. Independently and alone, he decided what to do and to leave undone. For every strong man attains to that which a genuine impulse bids him seek. But in the midst of the freedom he had attained Harry suddenly became aware that his freedom was a death and that he stood alone. The world in an uncanny fashion left him in peace. Other men concerned him no longer. He was not even concerned about himself. He began to suffocate slowly in the more and more rarefied atmosphere of remoteness and solitude. For now it was his wish no longer, nor his aim, to be alone and independent, but rather his lot and his sentence. The magic wish had been fulfilled and could not be cancelled, and it was no good now to open his arms with longing and goodwill to welcome the bonds of society. People left him alone now.* It was not, however, that he was an object of hatred and repugnance. On the contrary, he had many friends. A great many people liked him. But it was no more than sympathy and friendliness. He received invitations, presents, pleasant letters; but no more. No one came near to him. There was no link left, and no one could have had any part in his life even had anyone wished it. For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.”
And so there's just a whole bunch of 'shit' I'm going through and am surprised to see aspects of me that I'd forgotten. "Wow, was I ever like that? Look! Look at me! So filled with hope and misery and plans! Good GOD, the plans I had!" Etc.
