Terribly Important Stuff

Just as I thought I had everything figured out, I've started to figure out that I really don't need more than half of the stuff I have. I don’t think this is the sort of junk I can just hand off on my friends and relations. It turns out that I have unwittingly amassed a colossal and exponentially accumulating collection of things that I might be the only person in the world who would have ever brought them home in the first place. Like a noxious weed, my junk is multiplying, and mutating to be a thing to reckon with. I don't think I can, with clear conscience, foist all my crap off on my kids any more than I can take it to the landfill for free. I expect it might even be construed as cruel and unusual punishment under the law. My stash of dried up varnish and paint cans, my scraps of wood, too small to be useful, my pillow cases full of used underwear and old cotton shirts, my broken auto parts collection, will all be here when I'm dead and gone, if I don't do something about it soon. It is increasingly clear that I will need an unlikely burst of energy to gain even the smallest semblance of order in my shop before it becomes someone else's problem.

I need a great divestment of junk, on the level of the Panama Canal excavation, so that I can even move around in my shop without being Simone Biles.

But I’m not defeated, not by a long shot. I have ideas. I’m thinking of putting in a toll-booth sort of affair on my dead end road that stipulates, if you use this road that goes by my house, and on into the forest or BLM land, or even just to get to a place to turn around, for any purpose at all, you must acquire, from me, a day-use permit. Where most permits come in the form of a slip of paper, and they cost you money, my permits would be free, and would come in the form of a sealed box, or drum, or maybe just a garbage bag. It would be issued upon entry to the lane at my property boundary, and anyone caught using the road without a permit would be issued a double, or triple permit, consisting of a whole pickup load of crap they must haul away to get away. For four wheelers, who are a fair amount of my traffic, I’d just weld some of my scrap iron to their machines in such a manner as to allow more stuff to be thrown on top.

The mailman is going to be the one who really suffers, as he turns around here 6 days a week. It is going to cost him.

One man’s treasure is another man’s trash, or at least I've heard something of that sort said, but it is really starting to feel like I am the only man who would ever have treasured this trash.

I’m gettin nowhere at reducing this mess, and I’m even beginning to think I’ve regressed. But I just wanted to make the world a better place; find uses for things that had lost their way. Now I guess I am just trying to make my place a better place.

If it wasn’t so much work, I’d just haul my junk up to the north fence, and slip it under the wire, onto the BLM. If they didn’t come and clean it up, I could call it a shelter belt for protecting my invasive skeleton weeds from the harsh downslope winds.

Nobody ever said that I’d get out of this world alive, but I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to take all of this crap with me. In my hereafter I wanted to travel light.

Oh well. It’s Friday, so I better close up here. I’ve got a couple of yard sales I want to go to. I need some boxes for my road permits. And I wouldn’t mind finding an old trampoline. The fabric on them makes great weed block, and the pieces of pipe can go in my pieces-of-pipe pile. The springs that keep the fabric tight are usually sprung, but there are a lot of them, and they can go in my sprung spring collection! Now here I am sounding like Neiman Marcus, out with my “spring collection”. But when one of my friends needs a sprung spring, who do you think they are going to go to? You got it! Me! Or at least I believe that is going to be the case, if anybody ever needs a sprung spring.

I learned in my high school shop class the motto, “A place for every thing, and every thing in its place.” I’ve been able to come pretty close to that workspace ideal. I have “a place for every thing, and something in every place”. Just no place for me.