Random Ramblings Maybe Even A Rant

 

MMMKAY I got to thinking of things I could blog about and one of my thoughts was about recent changes to my life due to decluttering and several months of a change in how I approach the various things that I collect. When someone collects stuff they do it for many reasons. When it gets out of hand it turns into hoarding or the maintenance of a hoard if the accumulation has stopped. Rarely does the accumlation stop.

Many people get attached emotionally to the collection or some of the idividual items which makes it that much harder to declutter the mess. That was me yep. Also emotions of how the stuff was acquired can contribute. For me it has been a lot of emotional attachment combined with a lifetime of collecting the stuff. Sometimes with the intent of "sometime selling it because it is worth a lot". The problem is you never give up on the stuff and keep it anyway. You procrastinate on finding a selling venue, or place too high a value on it. 

I saw the collections more as "libraries" for whatever media they were. I still see my music collection and videos in that way a library. There is so much I could never listen to, watch or read each and every item in the collection, thus the library label. You have a bunch of stuff you like and would like to experience sometime, even if you never end up experienceing most of it. It is there for you whenever you want. Many people have switched to streaming services and the cloud to store stuff, but the streaming services periodically get rid of stuff or make upgrades to the latest version of something so you can't access the original or in some cases what you want at all becuase they dumped it.

During my decluttering, which I am still in process, I don't think I will ever be totally clutter free, one of the emotional attachment things I cut loose was 90% of my comicbook collection. It went along with a large dinning room table that was much too large for my apartment, 4 chairs, lots of electronic equipment, and a small entertainment center on wheels, boxes and boxes of VHS tapes mostly home recorded off the air tapes, but some pre-recorded commerical product tapes, boxes of magazines, a pole lamp that was shorting out a couple of verticle cubbie organizers storage units, a very nice footlocker the size of a small steamer trunk. No room for the stuff. I used one of those junk hauling companies that will attempt to donate or recycle stuff before they go to the dump. So I feel a little relief about that. I hated having to "dump" a lot of stuff, and still did a lot of dumping before the junk hauling company came. I was in a panic mode to prep for an inspection that if I had failed they could have kicked me to the curb (due to the clutter). I wasn't sure if I could get the "junk" hauled away before the inspection, but I was able to. My cluttering was never any nasty moldy food, or animal feces (or human), just lots of clutter in boxes with very little organization at all. There were "areas" of stuff where I knew mostly what was there but not much specifically.

My attitude of "stuff" in the last couple of years has been "It is 'just' stuff". No reason to be attached to it. It doesn't make it much easier though there is still the emoitional attachment thing, and the logic games of why to keep stuff. You can't take it with you. Mortality is also a factor for all of this. I'm single no kids. The youngest of 4 siblings (1 deceased) . I do have 2 nephews now in their 30s, one by blood the other by marriage. Neither one seems to be interested in the stuff I have been into, so they would probably just trash the stuff anyway. Right now though I don't have a will so living in Maryland all my stuff would be in the hands of the state and they usually dump stuff anyway.

 

Random Thoughts And Stuff

Here I go the end of another month and I have to scramble to find something to rant, chat, talk or ramble on about. Not sure where this will take me. Maybe I will delete this before posting it because I found something else to yak about. So yeah I didn't have anything planned. Well that isn't entirely true I do have a few posts planned. A couple have been gathering so much dust they are now buried under several feet of peat moss.

I can't help but wonder if I have used the same post title before. Have I? Don't know. Maybe. It is sort of generic and does mention its randomness.

I guess I can post about this idea that I was going to post on Facebook at one time but decided not to. I live in a pretty typical suburban neighborhood that has it's share of crime but is far from a high risk high crime area. I live in a garden style apartment. You know the kind that has a handful of apartments per floor and the stairwell is exposed to the outside elements. The front "porch" landing area has our building's bank of mailboxes and then the stairs leading up to the units and some stairs leading to the first floor/ground floor apartments. My apartment is along the same side as the mailboxes on the second floor which if I have a large box or package waiting at my front door can be seen from the mailboxes. I am certain that in the last 3 or 4 years I have had 4 or 5 packages or boxes stolen from the front door. When the post office or UPS tracking says your package was delivered and there is nothing by your front door, then yep some low-life scumbag stole your package. You can't blame the person who shipped your order they kept their end of the agreement by shipping the package. You can't blame the delivery service, unless there were specific orders to not leave the package unattended. The only person to blame is the low-life scum bucket that nicked the package. I hope they enjoyed the worthless books, or beat up comics, creased trading cards, or the oversized t-shirt or whatever was in the package. One of the more recent packages stolen from my front door was a book about the Collyer Brothers, Homer and Langley who were among the first recorded Hoarders in the US. I find that almost ironic someone taking a book about hoarders, but it still pissed me off since the book is a little hard to find, not very hard, but difficult to find at a decent low price. But I digress somewhat.

So my thought about my neighborhood is this. In theory I could close the front door to my apartment and leave it unlocked, leave for the day and return without anyone ever attempting to open the door. I could probably leave it unlocked for several days and nobody would ever know. However, I'm sure if I left the door slightly ajar, or completely wide open and was gone for more than a minimum half an hour the chances of someone coming by and being curious about this completely vulnerable apartment would increase and I'd come home to having many items missing. The longer I was gone the more stuff that would be missing. Of course there is also the likelihood that nobody would disturb anything (depending on the day of the week I guess)  but that is less probable. I wouldn't expect anyone to be kind and close the door. I would never test this open door theory.

I also recall a few years back that after a yearly or biannual exterminator visit, I noticed a nice pocket knife was missing from my kitchen that I usually kept in a kitchen drawer but might have left it out on the counter that day. I can't prove it was taken. I don't recall enough details of the make of it to describe it well enough except it was all silver. I don't recall what exterminator service was used during that time or which year it was. Now days my apartment management company uses a different extermination service that comes twice a year at least, and they require that all kitchen and bathroom cabinets are emptied to make spraying easier and that all counters are clear. Plus no dishes in the sink. The time the pocket knife was taken the only prerequisite was that the counters were clear, oh and the no dishes in the sink. This totally empty and clear requirement also puts your apartment in more of a disarray than it normally is. I haven't recovered from the last round of spraying. Heck I never really recovered from moving into the apartment 11 years ago.

Wow this post turned out to be a bit of a bummer. I didn't think it would go to the dark side.