Root Down

One of the interesting things about moving is the archeology it requires, digging through layers of accumulation to reveal yourself. The longer you’ve been in one location the more stuff that’s accumulated. As far as I can tell there is no real way to combat the detritus of the world seeping into your space, save cutting off all contact with the outside world. I imagine monasteries are generally immaculate; the rest of us get out the pick axes and clear the rubble.

At first I spent a lot time thinking how hard it is to move, but then I realized it’s probably no harder to move out than it was to move in. Moving out just happens to severely compress time. You acquire over the span of 10 years. You un-acquire in a matter of weeks.

But in between the crap, the dirt as it were, there are the occasional shards of pottery and other things of interest.

Many moons ago I was down in Laguna Beach, CA at the now long gone Tippecanoe’s clothing store when I ran across a relatively innocuous dark olive green shirt. Probably handmade, it looked a bit like an old-style baseball jersey, with an iron-on number three in red on the front pocket. On the back it had a cheery serif script that read “Fuck Our Society”, flanked on either side by anarchy A’s in padlocks. You bet your ass I bought it.

I was in a band back then and I played quite a few shows in it. I’m pretty sure my friend Ruben asked me to play with his band on the side just because he wanted the shirt on stage with him.

This was Orange County CA in the mid to late 1990s, deviations from the norm simply didn’t happen. The shirt stood out. I didn’t wear it much. Wearing it was a kind of performance. And this site notwithstanding, I don’t generally live my life as a public performance. I haven’t worn the shirt since I moved back east in 1999.

Once, on the way to a show, we stopped at Trader Joe’s to grab a snack for the road and while we were standing in line I felt a tap on the shoulder. I had been conscious of wearing the shirt since I got out of the car so I turned around expecting some kind of confrontation, but it was a tiny older woman, not much over five feet tall, a grandmotherly figure who I had no doubt was about to express some offense at my shirt. But instead she looked me up and down and then smiled and said, “I like your shirt.”

I felt like that was probably the shirt’s high water mark. I don’t think I’ve worn it since. Why do I still have it? Fuck our society’s obsession with keeping things. I fired off an email to a friend I knew would want it and it’s gone.

This particular purge is probably the biggest I’ve ever done, both because we’ve been in this house the longest and because I’ve made the most money. Money, no matter how frugal you might be, seems to breed stuff. It’s not the purchases or the money that bother me though. Not even the dumb things like the $1300 TV that’s now worth essentially nothing. It’s the little things I did not stop myself from getting. It’s the lack of personal awareness they demonstrate. The old banjo that caught my eye at a junk shop outside of Nashville, the old mailing label and postage box set, the antique cards, the mediocre books that could have been checked out and returned and the coffee mugs. How many coffee mugs do I actually need? How many books am I reading right now?

All these little things are symptoms of my failure to appreciate things without possessing them.

I sold what I could on eBay. I took the books to a friend’s yard sale and looked at them on the ground there in a cardboard box before I finally realized there was nothing special about them at all.

The rest of the accumulation I pitched into boxes and dumped at my favorite local charity thrift store.

Not everything goes though. I’m not a minimalist counting up my possessions. Not yet anyway. The bus may not be huge, but it’s downright roomy compared to traveling with only a pack. We also have a storage unit for now. There are things I don’t want to throw away, but which also don’t belong in the bus. Like old photographs, which are probably the most exciting artifacts to stumble across in a moving dig.

It worries me sometimes that it’s always the same photographs I discover whenever I undertake these excavations. The photographs I have are a reasonable catalogue of my life from roughly when I dropped out of college until about 2001 when I switched to a digital camera. There are no physical artifacts documenting anything in my life for the last 15 years, save a handful of prints from our wedding.

On the plus side this keeps the entirety of my photo collection to single shoe box. But I wonder. I wonder how much fun it will be to dig through your parent’s hard drive in search of your youth. Will the hard drive even spin 50 years from now? Will there be an operating system and image viewers capable of reading all those zeros and ones? Do you have anything that could read the tape archives of 50 years ago?

I don’t normally advocate for buying stuff, but a Fuji Instax printer is on our short list of trip purchases. I want to leave my kids a record of their childhood that exists outside these digital walls.

That’s always the hard part of these excavations, figuring out what actually has personal value and what doesn’t. I find I’m often wrong. I thought the banjo and the books had value to me, but they don’t. Five years ago I almost threw out the photos. Now they’re the only thing I keep around.