Stuff

Stuff

George Carlin said, “How come my stuff’s shit and your shit’s stuff!”  I’ve been thinking about stuff a lot lately.  We all have it and more importantly want it.  The question that occurs to me is, ‘what is the requisite amount of stuff and what is overkill?’ 

A while back I wrote and hosted a TV cooking show that was shot at our home.  Over it’s five year run we gathered hundreds of pieces of cooking equipment and kitchen gadgets, along with 64 barbecues and several sets of dishes.  These all made the visuals of the show keep interesting and I felt they were necessary.  However, they now are mostly, just more stuff.  Stuff that needs to be stored moved around and then eventually gets put with the other stuff.  And with our busy lives in gets into that terrible category of, I’ll sort this out later.  I was going through old boxes the other day and I found a few that I put away 30 years ago.  Important stuff, at the time, old concert tickets, an interesting piece of metal, a hoola girl bottle opener, and my first instinct was, ‘oh good that’s where all this stuff is.’ 

Making matters worse I have other stuff that I’ve been collecting to build a cooking school, windows, commercial kitchen equipment, a fire hood, two commercial stoves and numerous bits of building materials. 

It dawned on me that I’ve become the caretaker of all my stuff and it’s running our lives!  So we are now on a, sort it, sell it or dump it campaign.  We’re also downsizing.  We’re selling our home and finishing our 900 square foot straw bale cottage.  This will require a great de-stuffing, to live in this small of a space, but we look forward to the challenge.  Maybe George Carlin was only partially right, my stuff is shit, just old shit that’s getting in the way of some really important stuff, our lives!