Yet another "stuff" discussion.

I've spent two of the last four days helping my buddy Sean Peezy and his special lady friend move into their new apartment. I am always available to my friends to help them move, but this time it was a little different as they are moving into a fourth-floor walk up.

All those trips up and down all those steps got me thinking: god help me when I move out. More than anything else, I have to figure out what the hell will happen with all the music gear that is currently choking my basement. I literally have enough to backline for the Eagles. I'll leave it at that because I don't know who may stumble across this posting... But still, seeing Sean, who is very similar to me in that we both play music, have fathers who are techie pack-rats, and are in school FOREVER (hence lots of books) struggling with all of his belongings and how to properly confine them now that he's not in a four-bedroom house has made me realize: I will be sorting though stuff for like a year when I'm getting ready to move. Oh well.

But I'm curious: what is it about our culture that brings us to hoard things? Is it our culture? The economy? I mean, we're all about disposable everything, but people in our day and age are consumers like the world has never seen before. What used to happen before everyone had a laptop, cell phone, a TV in every room, video game systems, and a remote to run everything in your house? Yes, I realize the irony of the fact that I stand here listening to music on my iPod, which is plugged into the extension speakers I usually have connected to my laptop while I type away on an external keyboard with a wireless USB mouse. I'm not immune to the scrutiny, but that doesn't stop my curiosity. Hell, in an attempt to be more ecologically sound, I still have all six cell phones that my clumsy ass has run through in the past five years. I have the speakers they took out of my car when I got the new stereo installed some four years back. Still, I fall back to the "out of sight, out of mind" thing -- those things aren't down in my hermitage, so I don't really care that they're still floating about me somewhere.

I guess what I'm saying is: look at things a bit more objectively. Do you really need that other book? Don't they have it at the library? Will you really use that CD much after you've imported it into your computer, or does it make sense to get half of your money back if it's going to sit on a rack gathering dust for years? Again, I know I obsessively horde music, but hey, cut a guy some slack.

Okay, I am tired, my back is a little sore and it's far later than I'd like to admit. Sleep well, kiddies.