That’s all your house is…it’s a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.” –George Carlin

I’ve been cleaning out the attic the last few days. I need to clean out the attic because it’s chock full of stuff, and I’m moving my studio to a home office, and I don’t have room for all the stuff. So the drafting table, at the very least, needs to go in the attic. Like the antique steamer trunk that’s up there now, it’s something I’d like to have in my house, someday, when we get a bigger house, that has enough room for two people, a business, a couple of equipment-and-space-intensive hobbies, collections of science fiction books and baseball cards and tiki mugs, and a cat.

These are some of the things I uncovered in the attic:

-a scanner that works, cost me $1000, but uses a SCSI connector and doesn’t have drivers for current computers

-several similarly obsolete computer peripherals

-a rat’s nest of cables, wires, adapters of various vintages and types

-obsolete media, including syquest disks and 3.5″ floppies

-gum from about 30 packs of baseball cards (ewww)

-a piece of looseleaf reading “Dear Justin, I meant to email last night but I”

-a passport from 1983

-A pair of pink converse sneakers, without laces

-A bag of pillow stuffing, open, original retail value $2.49

I also uncovered various items of potentially useful and/or sentimental value, including

-A set of bowls Barry bought on a trip to Mexico (with lead glaze, so unusable for food)

-A kindergarten-vintage ceramic dinosaur named Killer

-A burger king toy still in shrink wrap

-Baseball cards for the 1993 Durham Bulls, still in shrink wrap (as well as many other baseball cards)

-Menus from a 1961 Catskills resort called, I kid you not, The Homowack

Several large boxes were also filled with items from our personal media histories: 10 years’ worth of magazines that I wrote for filled one box (along with several copies of the Independent Weekly with articles by Dora), and several boxes held reel-to-reel audio tape from Barry’s radio shows of the 1980s on WUSB. I’m trying to envision a time when I will actually sit down in the attic and re-read my 1985 article on computer animation systems, but I’m not finding it.

I imagine many people have attics or closets filled with stuff that you never really look at, yet can never quite bring yourself to toss out. Moving is often the time when you face that choice: is this something that I want to drag across town, or across the country? Has this item outlived its sentimental usefulness?

In 1979, in the same month that I moved from NY to California with four boxes, a bicycle and a guitar, my parents downsized from a 4-bedroom colonial with attic and basement to a 2-bedroom Florida condo. A lot of stuff went by the wayside then, the piano being one of the larger items (although my Mom held onto some of the sheet music). When I moved my mom from that condo to a 1-bedroom apartment in Durham a couple of years ago, she downsized yet again. I looked at books that had been on our family shelves for 50 years and wondered if anyone had ever even opened the books, much less read them. There were drawers full of mementos that had probably never been looked at since they were put away.

Then there are the things that you toss away because they lack sentimental value, only to kick yourself years later when you see them on eBay. My old technology articles will never be of value to anyone, but the comics my Dad illustrated in the 1940’s for Fiction House are now being sold at auctions for hundreds of dollars. Every Archie comic from 1951 to 1996 arrived at our home in mint condition, but at no point did it ever occur to any of us to put one or two away in plastic to save for later years. We gave them away to cousins, friends, neighbors’ kids. Not that I regret that. We made a lot of kids happy by giving them foot-high piles of comics.

On the other hand, I’m really glad that my uncle saved the home movies from 1927 to 1938. I’ve been making DVDs of those to send to various cousins, and posting them on our private family network. I’ll be sending some of the clips to a historical society on Long Island that is interested in the footage of High Hill beach, a resort community that was razed in the early 1930’s to make way for Jones Beach State Park. Never having met my grandparents, or even seen photos of them, it’s magical to see a brief clip of a man in a bowler hat and know that he was my Dad’s Dad.

Yesterday afternoon, I hauled a van-load of obsolete computer equipment over to the monthly recycling pickup at Whole Foods (2-4pm 1st Saturday of each month. Check out the list of stuff that Philco Services will take off your hands). On the way, I was listening to NPR, where they were interviewing Annie Leonard, who has made a 20-minute video called The Story of Stuff. In an amusing way, she explains the ecological and psychological and medical consequences of our culture of consumption and planned obsolescence. It’s good stuff to think about. And I’ll do that at some point, but today, I need to throw out some stuff and move some other stuff around to make room for more stuff.

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