We’ve lost a lot of stuff in the couch and I’m wondering if it’s gone forever.
We can’t just shake the couch and get the stuff out, it’s in a null space, a realm between what is and what isn’t. I put my hand in there as far as I could, enduring mysterious scratches from what I pray are mysterious crumbs of some sort, and wished for the very first time that if I had a superpower it would not be flight, but that stretchy thing that Reed Richards was afflicted with in the Fantastic Four.
I don’t know what we’ve lost in there; we found the remote but the spare set of keys hasn’t shown up anywhere.
My wife’s supposition is that there’s just too much stuff to keep track of; we live with books, art supplies, musical instruments, cooking implements, sewing paraphernalia, robots, and tools. Marie Kondo would just pass right out in our apartment.
She has a world famous home organizational method; you discard everything in your home that does not spark joy. She’s written four books on organizing, which have sold over 4 million copies. That’s a lot of paper. I bet during at least one miraculous home transformation she had to chuck one of her own books in the bin. And she has an online store where she sells even more stuff – seemingly counter intuitive to her overall brand mission.
We seasonally purge and sort and thin, but then we want to make a custom guitar pedal or glow in the dark slime or it’s Halloween again and we need elven horns so we require Worbla or solder or strontium aluminate powder. We’re mad scientists. Our space is a physical distillation of lives lived in awe of and service to the arts (some of you must have five or so books stacked up next your beds right now? #nojudgement).
So we try to keep track of things, but in an effort to put in more… actual effort, I sought some section of our home that would benefit from a more focused filtering process.
I started with my Netflix™ queue.
At first it was easy; all the things I had already seen; Gone. Then, everything the critics said I was supposed to watch but I didn’t really want to, and then titles with people I liked but, y’know, the movie really sucked. I went through HBO Max™, Hulu™, and Amazon™ Prime™ the same way, and got rid of about 2/3 of the lists, and was super proud until I counted up how much space that all took up in the apartment.
So I turned to my email INBOX. That little red number was up in the thousands, but I viciously went after anything that didn’t spark joy in me, unsubscribing like a champion, until I realized how many bills and news bulletins are entirely necessary but I don’t necessarily enjoy. I did get rid of some of the political alerts, because, well, I still have thousands. How alerted do I need to be?
Practically, of course this wasn’t enough, so at this point that I got serious. Real and significant change was in order. I tackled my t-shirt drawer.
Two determining factors: subject and condition. Subject is far more important than condition, because my original CBGB’s shirt bought at the club when it was still open can definitely have a few holes in it. It can be mostly holes (like the proudest net of a New England fisherman) before I’ll ever throw that away.
Some shirts were memories of concerts attended, some of stories I loved and admired (I have like seven Ravenclaw shirts (#goblueravens!), some I would never wear but were significant objects – gifts from friends that have passed on, or places that no longer exist.
Plus, I found this Becky Lynch WrestleMania 35 shirt that I just put on.
Did I get a lot of joy sparks? Sure; these objects represent memories, that’s their value; I cherish them as a token of an experience. I realized that these shirts signify stories that I can tell, but they can’t. ‘Cause they’re shirts. These physical objects will outlive the memories, because memories are perishable, they’re not items or objects, they’ll go when I do, and I’m just bones and meat. The plate always outlasts the food. But we just can’t throw away all the memories that don’t make us happy; we’d be psychopaths, north without south, yin yang and all that.
The meaning of all our objects will someday be lost in SpaceTime’s couch, but today, this apartment holds more that what’s inside it; it’s a cave of both potential and legend, filled with physical stuff full of emotional heft. The Oscar Meyer Wienermobile whistle? My grandmother used to have one to signal my grandfather to come back to the camper from fishing for lunch. Could she have purchased a more legitimate device? Yes, she could, but then I wouldn’t have this on my bookshelf. Also, it wasn’t nearly loud enough, so she always had to add a werewolf-like “Yooo-hoooo!”, rendering the poor thing moot anyway.
My most prized piece of body trunk coverage is a Captain America bicycle shirt, obtained directly from a MARVEL storage closet almost 20 years ago. I wear it every Fourth of July to signify the dream that is the United States, which stands above wherever we are, to signify the best of what we all can become. It still looks good after two decades… I only have to kind of straighten up my back and, y’know, inhale with intention. It’s kind of a family tradition. I mean, Zoe knows I wear it every single year, so she always helps me look for it, because I can never seem to find it for some reason. I mean, the annual sight of me in a twenty year old skin tight red, white, and blue star-spangled spandex jersey? That sparks joy, right? Right?
Uh oh.
Space For Joy.