Reversal of the stuff

I was out a bit late last night listening to a few musicians I know. They have a band (though they were at a club doing an impromptu acoustic set) and are on the verge of signing with a major label and doing the whole rock'n'roll-band nightmare. For the bunch of goofy guys they are normally, they really can write and sing... I've heard their demo and they were pretty damn good.

I am starting to feel The Mall Sensation when it comes to meeting people around here... when I go shopping, typically around the holidays, I'll go to malls and walk the halls thinking, "all this stuff I'm supposed to want, and I don't want any of it!" It's getting like that with women around here. Sure, they may be physically appealing, may offer some sort of intrigue, but I am just too wary of biting wax fruit, I guess. Looks good, looks right, but you bite into it and it's glass or wax or something else equally appealing. In the case of women, it's "self-absorbed, neurotic, immature, or cold-hearted"

I don't choose to bite into those.

And you watch, now that I've decided to ignore local women, one of them will come out of the woodwork and surprise me.

A reporter from a local paper emailed me and asked if she could interview me for an article about why women and men tend to have little triggers that cause them to break things off with potential dates. I told her I'd be a good person to talk to, provided I don't have to name names. Not that I would anyway, but I had to throw that out there. It's bad enough that a lot of my past dates and girlfriends read this paper and would likely recognize me.

I am going to start what my friend Gus would call a "cleaning jihad" on my house. I feel like I want to get one of those big industrial dumpsters, the big steel rollbacks they use at big construction sites, park it in the street below my upstairs porch and just heave shit into it until there's nothing more to heave. I am just surrounded by little stuff that I may or may not ever use again.

Failing that, I will probably hit WalRusMart and get a bunch of those translucent plastic totes. Throw all the detritus in my house into them... all the CDs and DVDs, all the weird cords and cables, all the mystery boxes, all the clothes I don't really wear, and stack the fuckers in my barn or something. I just want... LESS STUFF. It's really getting to me. I want less stuff. Less. Much less.

When your stuff starts to own YOU, instead of the other way around, you've gone too far.