We have a storage unit, a 6 foot by 10 foot room in a gigantic warehouse building down by the docks: most likely used to be a processing factory for something that came in off a ship a couple of blocks away.
It is a de facto “extra room” of our apartment, one of three we desperately need in order to not vividly project the lifestyle of “artistic madpeople”. Or at least make it a little less obvious to visitors. And random passers-by.
As defined by its contents, this unit would be our “garage”: objects and papers and toys and clothing carrying significance but not immediate relevance.
My family hates it. My wife and daughter consider it a dangerous place filled with ill-balanced stacks of ephemera. They are not wrong, by any means, and my attempts to thin the density have only resulted in a barely perceptible gap from the tops of the stacks of the boxes to the mysterious pipes near the storage space ceiling.
Thus, I have decided to dedicate myself to the task of eliminating at least two boxes from our closing scene from the original Raiders of The Lost Arc movie warehouse cosplay space every month, anticipating its natural obsolescence somewhere around 2030.
The idea is this - I will choose two boxes and either dispose of the contents or integrate them into the apartment.
One might immediately see the yawning gap in logic here - bringing more stuff into the apartment eventually creates a critical mass where one might need to clear some space by, say, moving something into a storage unit. So it’s important to recycle or properly dispose of as much as possible. So I’m told.
So I picked up two boxes last weekend.
One was filled with furniture bits:
connectors to IKEA pieces
black plastic half tubes that snap on the grooved pipes used to secure metal kitchen shelving
fancy brass (looking) light switch plates actually made of plastic (most of them still in the package)
stuff like that. We have a drawer of that stuff already, so most of it went in there, with the truly archeological finds offered to the recycling bin.
But the next box was filled with old blank books - some of which were not blank at all, but instead filled with notes and ideas. I told my daughter that these were old hard drives, the kind that we had before laptops. I wasn’t kidding, really - there were plays and lyrics and insufferable musings as to the meaning of existance and a few letters and some stories. Or pieces of stories.
Technically, each of the notebooks was also a box, with stuff inside it.
So I meta-ed up and decided to employ my storage unit policy with these notebooks - go through each with a “use it or lose it” directive - my version of Spring Cleaning.
Ah, yes. Today is the last day of Spring for the year. Got it.
I’ll just hop to it, then.
Black hardcover 4 x 6. 1987 - 1988 (actual page usage: 45%)
Pretty run of the mill: but some pages in Mandarin (I was trying to learn) a “guest registry” from an impromptu party at my San Francisco apartment where the jam band Blues Traveler showed up (long story), insufferable musings, plans for shows that I could never afford to produce, more insufferable musings. It will feel good to recycle this book, as there is no gold in this pan, only dirt and muddy little rocks. Feh.
Salvaged: names from a future novel - Club Sirocco. The Acquiesce Lounge. Verity Jones.
The quote, “I’ve got a slight headache.” Seems pedestrian, but you never know.
And a story prompt, “Satan has no more room, and he’s stopped buying souls.” which is a great start to something…like:
You can’t sell your soul anymore.
There used to be a big market for that kind of thing, but a Major Investor pulled out of trading. Rumored to possess a “Fort Knox of Souls”, this high roller (or very very low one) controlled the value of the entire category, but as no one could properly verify his holdings (and return to talk about it) doubts as to its existence eventually led to the devaluation of all souls everywhere.
A soul is best traded at this point on EBay, which is a quite reputable option, although some lean towards Facebook Marketplace, but that’s a bit more sketchy and if you ask me - when dealing in rare collectables, it’s best to put safety first.
There are, of course, upcycle opportunities, kind of a heightened consignment, where you clean them up and offer them as “nearly new” at discount prices: for those who thought you’d never see yourself with a soul, you might want to check out these outlets. Some have even found the soul they sold, all cleaned, pressed, and surprisingly back in style again.
Yeah. That’ll be fun to play with.
There was also a page containing just one name. Now, making up names for stories was always super fun before the internet, because if you didn’t know anyone by that name and neither did anyone one you knew (and it wasn’t in the phone book), then it was fair game to use. I thought that’s what this was.
But then I looked up the name: Catherine Anne Porter. On top of my egregious misspelling of her first name, I had forgotten that she was a tremendous Pulitzer Prize winning author whose book I had sworn to read someday.
So I just bought it. It’ll be here tomorrow. And YES, I understand that now I’ve gotten RID of a book in order to just to bring a (slightly thicker) book INTO the house. I am a man at peace with irony. But at least the (slightly larger) space will be taken up with something inspiring, and not, y’know, insufferable.
Mead composition books, pair, 9 3/4 x 7 1/2 in (page usage: 2%)
The front of each book reads “Season One” and they only contain titles of stories I’ve never had time to write, then the blank pages I was supposed to write those stories on. So precious.
But these are good notebooks, with that super thin lined paper that’s hard to find, so I’m just cutting out the pages that I used with a razor blade and putting them in the chest next to the couch with the other blank books.
There was one line that was written,
“…proud to be herself and inspired to be more.”
This was way before my daughter was here, but I hope it refers to her.
A couple of these were filled with actual notes for actual projects I’m still hoping to complete, but one, a purple suede sort of affair, held what must be my only attempt at an actual journal. Only three pages were used, but one quote kind of jumped out at me:
“My confidence…is more based on being able to roll with the punches than throw them.”
I’m sure that was written about 25 years ago, but I have not yet matured into a pugilist of any sort… being “able to take it” is still my cardinal virtue.
I’ve had many ancestors who “could take it” but they never got to decide how difficult “it” was, and like the rest of us, they could only “take it” for so long. As it is also Juneteenth today, I feel it important to state how grateful I am for their perseverance and courage, making it possible for me to have memories to sort through and build upon.
I hope to create something with the time and opportunities they’ve made possible, not mere ephemera to be filed away, but works of significance and relevance that folks would choose to pull in from their garages and proudly display on the far too populated shelving in their homes.
Ah, well. 21 notebooks to go.
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