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barrettchase.com
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Sun, 06 Mar 2011

So I'm watching American Pickers and it's the episode where the Pickers are being led around the property of a guy the locals refer to as the Mole Man. He's short and dodgy, and it's hard to determine his age though he appears to be in his 50s. He wears a purple hoodie with the hood up and cinched tight around his face. Immediately you realize that the guy is nuts.

The Mole Man leads us around the exterior of his property, warning to be careful near a rickety wooden tower, which is apparently full of old books. There's a one-room schoolhouse, which he purchased, disassembled, and then reassembled in his yard. Eventually we get to the entrance to his underground network of tunnels, and that's where things get good.

I call Christa over to check this out. Christa doesn't like this show, but I think she'll appreciate this whack job who's hoarded old toys and Christmas decorations and whatnot underground, burrowing further into the earth whenever he needs more room for his junk. Admittedly, it's nice junk and a lot of it has real value. He's not the type of guy you see on other shows who hoard, y'know, used Kleenex and dead gerbils. He's a collector, with an eye for beauty, even if he is insane.

Christa eyes the Mole Man up, and eventually points at him. "If not for me," she says, "that would be you."

To tell you the truth, I waffle between two extremes. Though what she's saying is a joke, I can definitely see where it comes from. I'm not a hoarder. Not at all. But I am the kind of person who might find an old piece of junk laying on the side of the road and think, "Cool." I could image that, unchecked, I might descend into a lifestyle that involved mass acquisition of useless items.

This would involve a lot of "giving up" on my part, though. While I am attracted to useless stuff that simply looks cool, I'm also repulsed by the useless stuff I already own. On one hand, it's kind of nice when these useless items suddenly become useful. I love those times when an unforseen need for something arises and I think, "Hey, I have one of those," before scampering down to the storage room and digging to find just that.

But for the most part, one of the things that makes me really happy is uncluttered space. When I say it makes me happy, I'm not kidding. Clean spaces literally make me smile. Maybe that's just because I'm not used to seeing them. I don't know.

One of the things I pride myself on is my ability to travel light. When going somewhere for a week or so, I rarely need more than what will fit inside a backpack. What does a person need beside clean socks and underwear anyway? A decent pair of shoes, an ATM card, a phone, and maybe a book.

Sometimes I have this fantasy that I extend that to the rest of my life. That we get rid of all this material junk and start living a stark, clean life where everything we need is stored electronically on tiny devices that can easily be stowed out of sight. You have a bed and some comfortable places to sit, some clothes which are neatly put away. It's all very science fiction meets Dwell magazine. I think on some level that would make me happy.

But then. Then there would be that time when you're making a great dinner and you need that weird combination egg separator/vintage meat fork/flour sifter combo, and it isn't there, so you either have to go out and buy one or somehow make do, and you look around your clean Gattaca living space and think, "maybe the Mole Man was right after all."

[filepath: /journal]