On the search for identity through shopping

Being a further inquiry into the collecting of junk

  

Cleaning up is a highly therapeutic activity, which I can wholeheartedly recommend to all readers. It is cheap, enjoyable, good exercise and provides hours of entertainment for young and old.

Well, no, it's not quite all that. For one thing, it takes far less time and effort than one would think (than I thought, at any rate, which is part of the reason why things got so far out of hand). It can be quite entertaining, though, to see long-forgotten items coming to light after years out of sight, things one had long since forgotten having acquired.

It can be less entertaining, rather saddening, to find certain things and to reason out why they had been purchased. My cowboy boots, for instance: tell me again why I bought them? Probably to act as though I were the kind of person who wore cowboy boots, like an urban Sam Shepard. The truth is that I am not that kind of person, and though the boots fit well and looked great, I was simply not comfortable wearing them in public.

Then there are the catalogues of things that I considered buying. I found a whole bag full of pamphlets and papers from the 2002 Frankfurter Buchmesse, my first time there; things that I had picked up because I wanted to consider myself the kind of person who read that kind of book (and sometimes could afford that kind of book). Well, I'm not. I have not purchased a single one of the books or magazines or services represented in that bag's contents, and I cannot say that my life is any the poorer for it.

But it's not all as sad and woeful as that might suggest. One also finds signs of progress, little hints that one has left certain less-than-desirable parts of oneself behind; and whether this has happened by design or by the slow drip of time is (I think) immaterial against the fact that it has happened.

Progress is being made, dear readers; one pile and one bag and one dustbunny at a time.