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Throwing Things OutNovember 03, 2010 It's not that I don't like buying things; it's that I hate throwing things out. Things, not paper. I don't mind throwing paper out. Sometimes I love throwing paper out. I just reconciled four months' worth of bank statements and chucked the agglomeration of multiply-folded deposit and debit card slips that were making such a paunch in my checkbook. Finally I'm going through the small mountain of paper that has accumulated near my desk. This stuff started out on top of Travvy's wire crate. The first time I dismantled the crate to take it on the road, the stuff -- reading material, newspapers to be clipped, receipts, bank statements, etc. -- got dumped in that little corner. When the crate came home, some of the stuff migrated back to its all-too-convenient top, and the rest of it stayed in the corner. Both accumulations grew, stealthily but steadily. I hate filing. Filing is incredibly tedious and time-consuming and the only thing I have to show for it is a negative, as in "that ugly pile of junk in the corner is gone." Oh wow, how accomplished is that? Lately, though, I've had this nagging suspicion that the ugly pile of junk in the corner is a metaphor for my life being a heap of unsorted crap that's threatening to go out of control -- like I still haven't paid my third quarterly estimated tax to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because I got a memo from the state saying I'd underpaid last year's tax by a modest amount and I wanted to make that up with my third quarterly but I couldn't remember the amount or find the memo because it was in that pile somewhere. As incentives go, not being hauled off for tax evasion is a better motivator than the satisfaction of seeing bare carpet with no junk piled on it (and coincidentally of being able to reach the bottom shelf on the little bookshelf that the pile is in front of). So I've been working on it, poco a poco. I found the memo (haven't made the quarterly payment yet, but I will, I will), got four months' worth of bank statements in order, and balanced my checkbook, which is to say that my paper checkbook is now in accord with my Quicken one. For good measure I entered the data from my credit card statements, which were backlogged to last February. So in the process I've tossed a lot of paper, but as I started off saying, I don't mind throwing paper out. Throwing things out, on the other hand, makes me feel guilty, especially if those things have some use left in them. Case in point: the Rubbermaid dish pan in my sink. I got it when I moved into this apartment, which was more than three and a half years ago. It gets grungy for sure, but from time to time I scrub it and bleach it and it looks -- well, not quite as good as new, but at least like less of a health hazard. If I'm healthy, how much of a hazard could it be, and if no one else ever sees it, who cares how it looks? Until this morning I managed to keep answering "not much" and "not me," respectively, but deep down the uneasiness was growing. Considered in isolation, the pile of junk in the corner might seem like no big deal, but considered in the context of a dish pan with ground-in dirt and green tinges rising up on all four sides, an impartial observer might conclude that the householder who tolerated these things might be in trouble. The trouble was feeling guilty about throwing out a dish pan that was still usable. It was, I decided, time to get a new dish pan and throw the old one out. So I stopped by Shirley's Hardware and bought a new one for $6.99. And a new spatula for $2.99 -- the old one was like a fingernail that's half ripped off and keeps catching on things. Also windshield washer fluid for Malvina and a scrub brush to clean the window screens with when I take them off for the winter. The old grungy dish pan went into the trash barrel. Briefly I considered recycling it into a planter, but I have all the planters I need so I recognized the impulse for the vestigial guilt that it was. Also into the trash barrel went my old gray backpack. Last winter the last of its working zippers died, my wallet and checkbook fell out of it a couple of times, and I decided that after about 35 years of using backpacks almost exclusively I would try something else. My messenger bag was a big success; it's now my laptop carrier, and I'm toting a smaller, burnt-orange bag from Duluth Trading that has a satisfying number of compartments and is just the right size. Its one serious drawback is that it's hard to carry on a bicycle. For that I needed a backpack. The unzippable old one was still in my closet. I admitted to myself that I wasn't going to use it, and if not me, who? Into the trash it went. Its replacement is on its way from L.L. Bean, along with a new camp sleeping bag and (of course) a new pair of corduroys. I've gotten rid of nearly all my horse stuff (except my saddle -- anyone want a comfy wide-tree Michael Stokes dressage saddle?), so yesterday I loaded the tack trunk I used to keep most of it in and took it down to the Dumptique, aka the recycling shed at the West Tisbury dump. Someone claimed it before I even took it out of the car.
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