They are next, Light willing. It is them or me.

Another glass jar went to town today. It was the last in the kitchen, finally.  Next I’ll start on the two plastic shopping bags with glass jars. What? I was not lying about the packrat tendencies. Joking, yes; but not lying.

Each day after work, I have thrown away something I would not otherwise throw away, even if only a couple CDs. I have already come to the end of those CDs I can’t imagine why I bought, and those I can remember why I bought but just loathe now. Lately I have ripped CDs with one or two actual good songs, or at least not bad.  I even threw away the compilation which had Richi M’s “One Life to Live” on it. The song, not the soap opera obviously.  Albums with any good tracks on them are ripped to the hard disk where my actual music is, so I can still listen to them after I’ve thrown them away. I actually did that with “One Life to Live“.

Some days I forgot to throw something away when I came home, but at some time during the afternoon the Invisible Hand clicked on me or something, because I remembered it.  Despite this, my garbage can was not full today, which is garbage day.  We only have garbage day every two weeks even, but I naturally generate little garbage because of my small family size. It is not just that I squirrel things away.

Anyway, I threw away two shirts as well.  That was hard. It is not like I can rip them to the hard disk and throw away my cake and have it too, like the CDs.  One was an otherwise whole yellow shirt that lacked a lot of buttons and had a few paint specks on it.  I could have sewed on buttons. Had this been 40 years ago, that would have been the obvious choice. Then used it at home.  Many more times could I have used it.  It is not like I wasn’t thinking of that. But then I was honest to myself and knew:  Even if I were to live here for a decade more (Light send that it be so!), I would still not have worn that shirt.  In fact, I may not even have opened all my shirts. There are several lying in my cabinet now that have never been opened, that I bought years before I moved here. There are others that are opened but that I am not sure I have ever worn.

As my witness I call the other shirt I threw away today.  It was whole, clean and sturdy, of a comfortably soft fabric. Unfortunately it was also several sizes too small in several directions. (Not just over the stomach!!)  Either it has shrunk quite a bit during wash, or I have dragged it with me since I was a teenager.  That may sound outlandish, but I know this: When I moved here, I found this shirt and its twin in a crate in the backmost storage room, a crate from when I moved last time; they had never left it.  I had lived there for nearly two decades at the time.  Most of my adult life.  So it is not entirely impossible that I have carted it along for ten years before that again, which puts me near the end of my growing years. O_O  Words become small.

And despite my relief in having actually thrown out things, I did get something new as well. A book came in the mail from Amazon. It is rare indeed that I buy physical books anymore, so rare that it never occurred to me to put it on a wish list.  Sorry about that.  Besides, when I want something, I really want it, meaning I don’t want to wait around. Plus, basically, the idea that others should buy me stuff instead of the other way around is just inherently wrong and unnatural at this stage of my life.  Anyway, this is why I must fight the good fight against clutter every day, may the Light give me strength.