Avoiding the deadly curse: Too much stuff

OK, so I've been cleaning. Really cleaning. Purging might even be a more correct description. And I am a pack rat. Certifiable. I just can't throw stuff away. Every now and then I get an urge to purge, if you will, and I'm currently in one of those phases. And I'm always amazed at what I find when I start digging - and at what I am compelled to save. This time I came across a scrap book from my time at MSU. In that scrapbook is a collection of articles clipped from the MSU paper, The State News, by my favorite student columnist: Glenn McDonald. I had a mad, mad journalistic crush on Glenn McDonald, and I couldn't wait to read his column. I thought I'd share it with all of you, because it still, to this day, resonates with me and all of my current stuff. I, too, attempted to get rid of a bunch of my stuff this summer - at a garage sale with a bunch of other friends from work. While I was successful on some level, much of the stuff still came home with me, along with some of the stuff everyone else was selling, because I thought it was cool. Somehow I don't think that's the point of participating in a garage sale - to come home with all the stuff your friends no longer want. But that's what I did.

So here it is, verbatim: I'm not trying to take any credit, because I'm not this clever. This is all Glenn McDonald, circa 1990-something. Wherever you are now, Glenn, I love you, man.

Avoiding the deadly curse: Too much stuff.

I have way too much stuff.

This realization is periodically hammered home when I move into a new place. Coming back to school, in particular, has become an annual ordeal of dispair. Nonetheless, every August, I  attempt to transport 46 cubic feet of matter that is My Stuff 76 miles from Detroit to Lansing in one trip. Kind of like the ancients crossing the Bering Strait, but not as fun.

The hell of it is, I made a sincere effort to get rid of a lot of things  this summer. Having become decidedly less sentimental since Jodie Foster refused my marriage proposal, I threw out boxes of personal tokens and remembrances - love letters, photo albums, Hoffa's remains - yet I'm still traveling barely lighter than Operation Restore Hope.

My problem is this: I seem to have this schizoid pack-rat mentality by which I can find several bizarre purposes for a completely disposable item.

For example, there's this little plastic Halloween skull I stole in 10th grade on a dare. For seven solid years now, I've been carting this thing around for the sole purpose of hollowing it out one day and using it as an ironic little ashtray. How lame is that? Seven long years for a gag I'll never get around to, and that isn't all that funny to begin with.

Then there's all this band equipment I've kept around since my days as a cool punk-rock guitarist. Nothing valuable or glamourous, mind you - stuff like used guitar strings and adapter cords and shoulder straps. Still, I'm convinced that one of these days I'll be at a club and Bob Dylan will show up for a surprise gig. And in his moment of need, I shall provide that gleaming e-string. And we will be pals.

So that's my problem. Thousands of useless items doomed to totally bogus destinies.

Not only do I have loads of stuff I can't use. In my four years of college, I've had a dozen or so different residences, so now I have stuff I can't use in places I can't remember. Now, on the surface, this situation would seem to resolve itself nicely. Not so.

See, I have a keen sense of karma, so I know that if I leave my stuff for someone else to deal with, within weeks I will somehow come into possession of a pile of strange new useless stuff. This stuff will be twice as mysterious, and twice as hard to get rid of.

So I feel obligated to keep track of all my distant stuff. Just this week, I got a call from (this is true) Albequerque, New Mexico, where I evidently have some stuff. Never mind that I've never even been west of the Mississippi, far less New Mexico. The fact is, an old roommate of mine recently moved there, only to discover some of my stuff had leeched onto her stuff. "Like barnacles to a manatee," was how she phrased it.

I told her not to panic, but it would probably be awhile before I could reclaim that stuff. In the meantime, I suggested that she conspicuously leave some of these things laying around the house. It's likely that the stuff will attach itself to someone else all by itself, effectively diffusing any future stuff-karma.

In addition to New Mexico, I also have little caches of stuff in Detroit, Chicago, Ann Arbor and an abandoned grain silo outside of Boston. (A long story). Naturally, I'm also responsible for countless territorial pissings of stuff right here in East Lansing.

In fact, if you check your basements and closets right now,  you're bound to find a few of my things. Of course, I also have some of your stuff, no doubt, so in the spirit of reconciliation I hereby declare a campus-wide amnesty on stuff. You deal with mine, I'll deal with yours, and we'll call it even, OK?

Unless you're the swindler who nicked my Trip Shakespeare disc at last year's Halloween party. You can drop that off at the State News offices, no questions asked.