Mitch: Days 9 - 13 Part I

Days 9-13 (effectively). Purge your stuff. If you can devote a weekend to purging the stuff you don’t want, it feels seriously terrific. Get boxes and trash bags for the stuff you want to donate or toss.

I'll just come right out and say it. So far this has proven to be the most difficult thing for me to do. Which is somewhat shocking to me because I hate having stuff. I hate clutter. It's why I don't bother to put things in some orderly place. I simply don't care enough to do so. It's a major reason why I've been trying to digitize everything that I can. All of my CDs live on my computer, my computer's backup device, and my Zune. All of my TV shows and DVDs are ripped to my home media server and backed up. The books I love are gradually making their way onto my Kindle. And the digital counterparts of my physical media are far more organized because I use them on a daily basis. As for my physical media, I have not opened a CD case in over two years.

With that in mind, today I picked up a couple dozen boxes and I began the purge. CDs and DVDs went into boxes to take to our local used record store. Soon my books will start going into boxes, hard covers into one group for my mom to resell on Amazon, and paperbacks to be donated to various organizations based on their content (i.e. if your child has to visit the children's hospital you will not catch them reading about Tywin Lannister's exploits in A Game of Thrones; at least, not from my copy of it). My bookshelf for music, movies and television shows and my bookshelf for real, actual books will both be making their way to the local dumpster, as they're barely holding together as is. And at the end of that journey, three to four full carloads of boxes that have only gathered dust on shelves for years will be lifted from my shoulders and distributed out for others to enjoy.

And yet, as they sit boxed up on there on the floor while I write this, I'm still not sure I'm going to be able to do it.

As I shuffled piles of CDs neatly into a pit of cardboard, I would find myself pulling out albums that symbolized poignant moments in my life.

• I pulled out my original copy of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral, the first CD that I truly, emotionally connected with, given to me by my friend Tedd when we were 16, the record that started my passion for music.
  
  
• I came across my release edition of Jimmy Eat World's eponymous record, which, on my copy, is still titled Bleed American. The album only bore that title for the couple weeks after its release in early September, 2001. On the 11th of that month it was immediately recalled and renamed. Every time I see it brings back all the feelings from that day.
  
  
• My well worn copy of Dashboard Confessional's Swiss Army Romance was in there. It was the record that introduced me to the genre of music that would dominate my early to mid-twenties and inspire me to learn how to play the guitar. This was largely in part thanks to an awesome and long-defunct internet community called Dashtabs. It was comprised of Dashboard-loving guitarists who pooled together to tab out everything Chris Carraba wrote and teach amateur guitarists (like myself) how to play his songs. Chris himself would even post there from time to time. In fact, The Sharp Hint of New Tears was the first song I ever played live in front of an audience, and I probably still know how to play more Dashboard songs on my acoustic than everything else I've learned combined.
  
  
• I found my second copy of Portishead's Dummy (the first one was played so much that the buildup of little scuffs and scrathes finally made it unplayable), which always makes me think of driving home from a Tori Amos show in San Diego with my best friend Sarah, both of us belting out the lyrics to Glory Box - "Give me a reason to be a woman". She loves that story. More so for that and less so for the fact that my car broke down at 3am less than 30 minutes from home.
  
  
• I also found my copy of Lateralus by Tool, whose first listen was akin to a religious experience for my friend Russ and I. We loaded it up into the home theater, cranked up the volume, turned the lighting to utter blackness so all there was was the music, and we sat there in silence and took in the entire sonic journey. It also reminds me of us nearly getting ourselves killed (a number of times) on an epic road trip to Denver. Russ had been able to rig a tiny sound system into his Mustang so we could rock Lateralus, but it gave out and we were reduced to splitting a pair of earbuds.

And those were just a few of dozens of incredibly important records to me, like Massive Attack's Protection, Strangeways, Here We Come by The Smiths, Black Celebration by Depeche Mode, Radiohead's Kid A, and, of course, Disintegration by The Cure, all which bring me back to very specific times and places in my life.

And while queuing up the music on my Zune often brings me to those places as well, it's not quite like the act of picking up the same case I picked up with hands a decade or more younger, opening it up, taking out a booklet tattered from using it to learn the words, or from immersing myself in the artwork, or picking up the CD and seeing the scuffmarks from its history of being listened to, putting it into a CD player and listening to the hum of it spin up while eagerly awaiting for the first track to begin.

I was talking about this with my friend Heather G. today, and she described her collection of music, movies, and books as being an anthology for her life. For that reason alone she would have a really hard time getting rid of those things. It would be like throwing away a photo album and all the history that goes along with it. She talked about what a great memory it was to pull out some of her mom's old vinyl records and take that journey to discover a piece of her parents that she would've never been privy to otherwise. It made me think back to my mom's Simon and Garfunkle 8-tracks that she had when I was a kid, and how mystical her music collection was to me even then. I still hold a reverence for those two because they symbolize a gateway to the person my mother was before I was born, a person I never had the chance to know. There's definitely something significant about being able to tap into that kind of history.

For example, people travel all over the world just to be able to be close to places of historical significance. Sometimes the events that took place in these areas happened hundreds or thousands of years ago, so the people visiting often have no true context of the events that took place other than what they learned from the tour guide. But, for just that brief moment, they're able to step back in time and stand in the same place where those before them stood so long ago. It's like like tapping into the heritage of all of humankind and finding a piece of ourselves there. I had this experience several years back while I was in New York City, visiting Ground Zero. Even though bulk of the devastation was long gone by then, it was a humbling experience to feel the raw emotional resonance of actually being there, compared to the remoteness of the shock and disbelief that I had while watching it from a tiny television 2,600 miles away.

I bring this up because my friend made a very similar point about saying farewell to our books and our music. There's something about being able to tap into the nostalgia of the pieces of ourselves, or of our parents, by picking up a musty old record, or taking in the scent of a half-century old book just as there is in standing at a site of historical significance. Logging onto a computer and scrolling through a digital album listing just doesn't carry the same kind of power as being in the true presence of history. This makes saying goodbye to these nostalgic keepsakes, despite their having long lost their utility, like saying goodbye to a part of myself that I'll never be able to get back, to a person my children will never have the opportunity to know. It's a threshold that, once crossed, is closed off to us forever.

And yet, this very moment, five new colossi begin to stretch into the night sky above a memorial for that day in September, proving that we can both let go and move forward without having to forget.

After all, as wonderful as that tattered memory of Simon and Garfunkle is, an old 8-track will never come close to touching the experience of having a mother who loves me. And as for my own media anthology, if divesting myself of some dusty old boxes can bring me even one step closer to being able to dedicate my energy to creating memorable moments with my future children, then I'd say the trade-off is probably well worth it.