Purging

It’s All Too Much.

A book by the dude from Clean Sweep, a show on TLC I haven’t seen in three years. Peter Walsh is his name. He’s great. Very convincing.

Here’s the thing; I cannot let go of stuff. I love cool stuff, or, I love things that remind me of something deemed worth remembering. So, as I’m sure many of you reading this are with me, what do we do? We get the thing (a ticket from a concert or Broadway play, a wedding giveaway, a map from a vacation spot you loved) and we…drumroll…put it in a Rubbermaid bin and stick it in a corner, or a closet, or a crawlspace.

Perfect! What a great way to honour this thing you felt was too important to recycle, or NOT BUY IN THE FIRST PLACE! I think when these actions are put into some kind of perspective, we get the sense that this is a very dumb way to go about collecting/honouring the few things we actually appreciate.

For instance, my father has given me some stuff from when he was in the American Air Force. Did I put it on a mantle with his military name tag, maybe a photo of him in his uniform? No, it’s in a desk drawer somewhere. Obviously, this is VERY special to me.

Facetious today, I know.

Within the pages of this book are the keys to realizing why we get attached to things, and why we SHOULD or should not be connected to them. And this book was a perfect thing for me to pick up. Kevin Kelly had recommended it, and subsequently, Merlin Mann had given it a thumbs up. I have an insatiable appetite for keeping stuff I shouldn’t.

On top of that, my wife also likes to keep EVERYTHING! Clothing, shoes, purses, lamps, receipts, picture frames, obsolete kitchen gear, and more. Between the two of us, we are buried in junk that we don’t really appreciate or use. It’s better defined as “clutter” rather than the image some people get of hoarders, stumbling through shabby shacks full of abused pets. We just can’t find things when we look for them (generally speaking) because we don’t have a “place” for things. Scotch tape could be anywhere at any given time. Why is this? Wouldn’t it be good to know where the Scotch tape is, whenever it isn’t in use? Sure it would! But the drawer that could be holding Scotch tape is being inhabited by the hobo batteries, listless glues, and wayward screws. This crap needs to go, or it needs to stay somewhere that it can be retrieved.

This has been the change.

Between the two of us, we have set aside mountains of stuff we are purging from our lives. We will be trying to sell these things at a yard sale soon. If they don’t sell, they go to the Sally Anne (St. Vincent De Paul or Salvation Army). Simple as that. They have been placed in these bins and boxes, and almost the action of finally letting the object slip through my fingers, or flitter away to the bottom of an already overstuffed bin makes the connection sever. Disconnect. Goodbye.

It feels so liberating! The rooms are already looking like the purpose they were meant for, which is one of the things Walsh suggests. Rooms need to provide the function you want them to provide. When they are overrun by things that are preventing that function, there needs to be a change.

If you’re afraid to invite company over to your house/apartment/hovel, then you are in the same position we were in, and you likely need to decide, “Do I want to live like this? Is this stuff helping me become/exist as the person I yearn to be?”

I am so pleased to see this stuff go! The books alone! I have so many books that I will never read again, and that I will never read for the first time because there are more current, more championed books that have been released in recent time.

I’m extremely proud of Jhoan for letting go of many objects that we had been holding for several years, and I am equally proud of myself for making the same decisions. Deciding to make room in my home, my brain, and my heart for better things. For things becoming of my ideal view of life. Our ideal view. Room for the joy of freedom from things.

The Trash of Naples

The awesome dude over at 365 Days of Trash has written a follow up on the story of the Naples trash problem.

I found that there were a lot of readers amazed by that story when I posted about it in the past, so I thought I’d give you the link to this update.

CLICK HERE FOR THE NAPLES UPDATE!

Holy garbage Naples!

This is one of those stories that has caught me off guard to the degree that I wonder why newspaper editors even wake up in the morning. This story is so profoundly indicative of what is to come, that I cannot understand the lack of attention being given to it!

Naples. Yes, the one in Italy associated with beauty and culture. Well, they have not had their garbage collected SINCE DECEMBER of 2007!!!!!!

Think right now for a second about how bad your streets/lawn would look if the entire city’s garbage wasn’t picked up for 6 months. Holy Jesus! What kind of strike would lead to this kind of unsolved dispute? There was no strike. The city simply ran out of room in the landfills. There are no legal dumps open at all in all of Naples! They have filled the dumps!

Again, this is one of those issues we sweep under the rug (the topsoil) in our daily lives. We just put these bags of refuse out to the curb and they magically disappear in the morning on “garbage day”. There is really no responsibility for people who abuse the system and refuse to recycle, or who just consume at such an incredible rate, that they leave 10 bags of garbage to be picked up per week. I often see houses on garbage eve, with up to 15 bags of garbage waiting to be heaved into a hole in the earth at the outskirts of town. I almost always end up shaking my head, lost for expression.

You see, I bust my hump to recycle and limit my trash output, and when I see a repeat-offending trash hoarder unloading a lifetime of garbage EVERY WEEK, I get a little miffed.

And I wonder, in Naples, if these people are starting to USE LESS! If you look a the pictures in the stories attached, you can see the plethora of stink left rotting in parking lots, streets, and yards. How has this not sparked HUGE health issues in the area? How has this story been untold to the masses as a warning of what can happen when you haphazardly toss away belongings like nothing matters at the end of this process?

I have always wondered how my neighbours (over the years) cannot realize how profound the imbalance is between the output of trash from themselves and the people living next to them. All I can say, really, is that if I put 6 bags of garbage out every week, and my neighbour put out 4 bags per month, and some weeks putting out nothing at all, I know I would wonder how the hell they do it. Lugging filth the curb is work. It’s almost too much work for our society’s most active, to haul out bags of garbage. But what this kind of trash output tells me is that the lack of awareness of the impact of trash on our city, environment, watershed, etc. makes it insatiable to citizens. There is no end in sight for the long line of garbage when no one is held accountable for the amount they waste.

I heard a conversation at the bar recently, where the discussion weaved into the possibility of paying for trash output. Citizens pay for the amount of bags (over the allotted amount) they require relief of, and if they stay under the limit, they pay nothing extra. Taxes take care of the minimum allotted amount. I love this idea. The only people who don’t like it seem to be those who are unable to put a little thought into the products they buy, maybe reducing output by buying things with less packaging.

If these kinds of garbage crises are going to “surface” in other cities, you can bet your bottom that people are going to pay.

I just wanted to share this with all of you, and maybe spark the question about how much we throw away. How much waste are you making? Do you rely on the magic of disappearing curb garbage fairies every week a little too much? Could you be easing the strain on your landfill?

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Quite a while ago I heard a podcast talking about this enormous gyre in the North Pacific Ocean that collects a hell of a lot of garbage and plastic. It is aptly named The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I read several articles to follow this up, and subsequently e-mailed Google asking them why I couldn’t zoom in on the North Pacific and see this monstrous garbage patch. Surprise! I never heard back from them. Just found a link to this great conversation about why there may or may not be any visible floating garbage.

The articles I read are from Best Life Magazine and The San Francisco Chronicle. They sadly inform on the state of The Horse Latitudes, which I think is a brilliant name for a band. The discussion basically boils down to the fact that when plastic photodegrades and becomes smaller and smaller pieces of plastic (eventually nurdles) it likes to absorb the most heinous chemicals known to man. No big deal? Actually, it’s brutal. It’s getting eaten by plankton, and just about every other freakin’ creature in the ocean. They eventually get these chemicals in their bodies, and continually pass it down the line until we begin eating our own goddamn garbage. Irony is painful.

So, everything from Bisphenol A, human biochemistry, jettisoned trash from freighters, plastic bag consumption, the evils of bottled water, and much more is linked to this story.

The details are in the articles linked above, as the experts did the work, and it is fresh for the reading.

However, I found the Holy Grail of Garbage Patch research when I found this documentary series produced by Vice Magazine. They had a guy write a short article on his journey into “The Patch” in a recent issue of Vice, and as I read it, I remember wishing for more. More images, more stories, more statistics, more hope. Lo and behold, here is this guy’s face, on a series of videos online comprising a documentary that I cannot WAIT to watch. I highly recommend this, as it is a strong young approach to the issue. Yeah, you may hear profanity here or there, but this is a more reasonable response than simply going about our daily routine creating more waste.

I feel like I can go on and on about this for too long. Not just the ocean issue, but about the waste culture I am firmly situated within. Maybe another day. In the meantime, please go check out these videos called Garbage Island by Vice.