Everything Must Go!
Garage sale. Saturday. I need to pay my heart’s outstanding bills.
The last two times I moved, I moved in May. Nine years ago, we moved from the first house we lived in after moving (back) to Wisconsin, into the second one. Seven years ago, we left that house and moved into the one we are now preparing to vacate. Though this time we are not moving until the end of June, I’m spending another May going through everything I own, deciding what to sell or give away or trash, packing whatever I’m going to keep.
I’ve moved a lot in my life. Every time, I wind up surrounded by piles of stuff I’ve amassed over the years, reminders of times past, friends and places gone, thinking: All this? I’m only x years old, and I’ve seen, done, collected all this?! And simultaneously thinking: This is all? This is all that x years on this planet boil down to? Yeah, I’ve been through this before. But it never gets any easier, and in fact, I think this time might be the hardest. See, this time, unlike the last two, I’m not just moving to a different house, I’m moving to a different town. I’ve moved to different cities and towns several times in my adult life, but during those moves (and all the others), I could just store things at my parents’ house until I was ready to retrieve them. But this time, my parents are also moving, and I don’t have that luxury. And my new place doesn’t have a basement. So I gotta get rid of a bunch of stuff.
It’s no secret that I’m not good at getting rid of stuff. I never have been. My first-ever pair of Chucks (bright maroon low-tops), which I got when I was twelve—my mom tried to throw them out a couple years later. I don’t blame her for trying to throw them out—they were full of holes, and the rubber was peeling off, and, oh yeah, I’d outgrown them. But I couldn’t part with them. “You can’t throw them out!,” I cried. “They were my first pair of Chucks! My friends wrote things on them in Sharpie!” Then I fished them out of the trash, and they lived in the back of my closet for a couple more years until I grudgingly decided I could let them go (only after taking a photo, of course).
No, I’ve never been very good at getting rid of stuff. Like Aaron Cometbus wrote:
I can’t let go of anything, not even the odds and ends I pull out of the pockets of old jeans.
A plastic ring: found on the ground, or presented to me as a token of eternal love?
Who knows, or cares? All the same, don’t throw it out. —from Cometbus #55
It’s always been the same way for me. Some of it, at least in my adult life, stems from being pretty much constantly broke. I’ve saved a lot of things because “I might need them someday.” Like every envelope larger than a greeting card that I’ve ever received—maybe I’ll reuse them to send out my own zines! Like boxes upon boxes full of bits of string and thread, and buttons from clothing I no longer own—I might need them to mend something! Like clothing that either doesn’t fit me right or that I’ve never really liked, if it’s still in good condition—what if I can’t afford to buy any new clothes and somehow every other piece of clothing I own gets damaged all at once? What would I wear then?! Like boxes of expired tea that I never liked the taste of—what if I’m out of every other kind of tea and can’t afford to buy more? What would I drink then?! (To take that last example to its most ridiculous extreme: there was a kind of tea that my husband bought me a box of like five years ago. Not only did I not like the taste, it made me phlegmy every time I drank it. I’m pretty sure I was allergic to one of the ingredients. I just finally threw the rest out about a month ago.) Like zillions of pages torn from old magazines, and sometimes, random things I found on the street—well, they’re pretty? (I am basically a motherfuckin’ crow), and also I can maybe make art from them someday!
But some of it comes from getting rid of things which I later regretted getting rid of. Like all the records & CDs & books I sold off because I needed money for rent or (more often) road trips & booze; which I decided at the time were okay to sell because either I wasn’t into those books or albums anymore, or I thought they’d be easily replaceable when/if I wanted them again. Spoiler alert: when it came to the former, I often got back into said album or book; and when it came to the latter—guess I forgot that a lot of what I’m into is relatively obscure, so finding it again wasn’t easy as I thought! (Though, in regards to the things I sold in order to have money for travel or just the best parties—I sometimes regret not having those things anymore, but I don’t regret the experiences they enabled me to have. As much as I get attached to stuff, I’d always rather have the experiences.) Like the clothing I gave away or sold because I thought I was “out of that phase of my life.” Particularly the punk clothes I got rid of when I thought “I’m not gonna be a punk rocker no more” (ha!), and the gorgeous vintage stuff (mostly c. 1920s-1960s) I got rid of when I thought “I’m too old to dress like that now.” Ugh. Like my collection of vintage typewriters, which I gave away to friends in Milwaukee when I was moving to Oakland, because I didn’t want to move them cross-country and thought “how many typewriters does a person really need?” Like about half of my former zine collection, which I gave away to various friends prior to that same move.
I’m better at getting rid of things than I used to be. Over the past five years or so, I’ve developed a habit of going through various rooms of my house every few months and culling things that I haven’t used or even looked at in ages. The “does it spark joy?” method has never really worked for me. I recently heard about the “poop method,” which is just to ask yourself: “If this had poop on it, would I clean it off or toss it?” That’s more akin to how I go about things, though I don’t actually have a particular method for deciding what to keep and what to toss.
I’m better at getting rid of things than I used to be, yeah, but really only when they’re in the “I might need that someday” category. I have figured out that if I’ve had an item of clothing for several years and barely worn it because I’ve hated how it looked every time I put it on, or a box of tea that I never liked the taste of, or some random item I was going to make art out of but it’s just been disintegrating in a box for nearly a decade, I probably don’t need to keep it. But this mindset doesn’t help me with things I have some kind of sentimental attachment to, and I can develop a sentimental attachment to damn near anything.
Some things I once saved, that I’ve since gotten rid of:
Ticket stubs and/or programs from every concert, play, and movie I’d ever seen. I kept the really special ones, from events I loved or otherwise have strong memories attached to, but I got rid of the rest.
A Caboodles full of beach rocks + sand. I found this while going through my stuff the last time my parents moved house. I had written the date of the beach visit on a piece of masking tape and stuck it on the plastic box. Because of that, I figured out that I’d collected the stuff when I took my best friend from Pennsylvania down to Lake Michigan, on that first trip she made out here after I’d moved to Wisconsin. I understood why I’d initially saved them. Still, they were entirely unremarkable rocks. They weren’t pretty-colored, weren’t hag stones, weren’t even shaped like anything interesting.
Literal trash. There’s been a lot of it that I’ve saved over the years. One example: when I went to summer camp at UW-Superior the summer I was fifteen, I had a crush on this pinball-wizard raver boy that was also attending camp there. One night, they took all of us campers across to Duluth, MN to get Chinese food, and the plastic fork my crush used to eat his Szechuan tofu? Well, uh…after he was done eating, I swiped it when he wasn’t looking.
Condom wrappers. Speaking of literal trash… For a while after I first started having PiV sex, I saved the wrappers from the condoms used during each sexual encounter. (No, I did not save the used condoms themselves, thank god.) I dropped the habit after a couple years, because I’d amassed way too many of them.
Bottles. Again, speaking of literal trash… For a while, I saved every bottle of booze that was emptied in the apartment I lived in at the time. Much like the beach rocks, most were unremarkable—they weren’t interesting bottles, nor were the labels anything special. When I left that apartment after living there for only eight months, but had enough bottles to fill half of a recycling dumpster, I vowed that from then on I would only save the special bottles.
Some things I’ve found while going through my stuff this time around:
Dead moths in matchboxes. I’ve had these for years. Though most of them have moldered nearly unto dust, I can’t get rid of them. I remember where and when I caught/found them, and the whole reason I kept them in the first place was that they were attached to memorable nights. And even the matchboxes themselves—they’re mostly for places that don’t exist anymore, and in the case of the ones that still do…hardly anyplace gives out souvenir matchboxes anymore, not since smoking bans went into effect pretty much everywhere.
Cigar boxes. I used to get them from a tobacco shop that gave out their empty cigar boxes for free. I mostly use them to make art a la Joseph Cornell, or to store other things in. If not for the storage or art aspect, I’d have no problem getting rid of most of them. Except for this one:
Acid Cigars are the kind I smoked the night I first saw World/Inferno Friendship Society live, so I put this W/IFS sticker on it. This one’s with me for life.
Three Chinese firecrackers. I found them under the bed in my hotel room in New Orleans the first time I went there, when Emchy and I were on Thee Hobo Love Tour. These stay with me forever, too.
Pins! Aka buttons, badges, whatever you wanna call ‘em. I recently went through a bag of ‘em I hadn’t looked at in a number of years. I found some unusual ones I’d forgotten about:
And some cool ones I’d also forgotten about and promptly added to my leather jacket: The Legendary Sun Studio, The Shangri-Las, and a Razorcake pin (from back when I wrote for them, meaning it’s somewhere between 21 & 24 years old).
I also found the pins from several exes’ bands & zines. I’m keeping most of them, but I did finally throw out the pin for an abusive ex’s zine, nearly 17 years after our breakup, and it was a relief. It reminded me that there are reasons, other than the immediately practical, not to hold on to everything. It’s not like I’ll ever forget him, or our brief and awful time together, and if I did—would that really be so bad?
Stick & poke supplies, from back when I used the “India ink & sewing needle w/ thread” method. I finally threw them out, after thoroughly wrapping them up, lest anyone accidentally touch them and get blood poisoning or something.
Pills. I used to enjoy taking prescription pills for recreational purposes. When I lived in Oakland, someone gave me two potent ones from her stash. But then I was waiting for the right time to take them, and it never came, and then I got pregnant with my first kiddo and decided I’d never take pills that way again. I’ve kept them with me all these years, in a small silk pouch, even though they’ve long since expired. When I found them again this time around, I put them in a bag with other expired medication, which I then took to the nearest drop-off point.
A crappy weed pipe. It was very 1970s (perhaps even from the ‘70s), with that whole racist faux-Native American style. I only smoked from it once, and honestly it sucked to smoke from. The only reason I kept it for so long was because a friend of mine found it in a dumpster and gave it to me. It’s in the trash (again), now.
Dried flowers. The free-standing ones that crumbled when you looked at them wrong, I’ve thrown those out. The ones pressed in notebooks, I’m keeping.
Candles & jars, candles & jars, dozens and dozens of candles & jars. You know you’re a witch when… In any case, I’m getting rid of some candles (like the ones I never liked the scent of), but keeping the rest.
The firefly jar. Speaking of jars… When I lived in Oakland, I mentioned to my bestie back in Wisco how sad I was that there are no lightning bugs in California. (Prior to that, I’d spent my entire life living in the midwest and mid-Atlantic, both firmly in firefly country.) So, one time when I came back to visit, she gave me a gift: a mason jar filled up with beach glass and fake flowers, plus a battery-powered strand of tiny fairy lights which twinkle like fireflies. Now, I wasn’t thinking of how it would look when I took it back to Oakland on the airplane, but…a jar, filled with bits of glass, with a battery pack in it? Yeah, TSA thought it was a bomb. It was an ordeal, I nearly missed my flight, but eventually they ascertained that it was not in fact an explosive device, and I got on the plane with my jar. After all that, there’s no way I’d get rid of it. This is another thing I’m keeping for life.
Another thing I came across the other day was an old hoodie—my favorite hoodie c. the ages of approximately 15-19.
I can’t listen to Anti-Flag anymore (after those recent allegations re: a certain frontman’s predatory behavior), and I never liked Agnostic Front all that much (I kinda felt like I had to because all the cool hardcore bros did). Still, I can’t let it go.
And then there’s all the paper stuff. Fortune cookie fortunes and tea bag tags printed with affirmations. Old address books full of contact info for people who are now dead or just no longer in my life. Decades upon decades of journals. And the zines. Copies and originals of my own zines spanning the entirety of my zine life (1994-now), plus my collection of other folks’ zines that, despite what I’ve gotten rid of over the years, is still pretty massive. Going through my zine collection has been my main focus over the past few days, and I’ve been having a hell of a time with it. All these reminders of old friends…
And all these reminders of people I met once at a zine fest and fell a little in love with but never saw again; or people I wrote letters to for years, and we always talked about meeting up if we were ever in the same place at the same time, but it just never happened. Uncrossed paths; missed connections. Even the zines whose creators I never had any kind of contact with—I mostly remember where I was, and what else was going on in my life, when I first read them.
Yeah, I’m going through my stuff, and emotionally, I’m also going through it. I’ll leave you with the Weakerthans tune from which I got the title of this missive, which also happens to be one of my all-time favorite songs.
Garage sale, Saturday
I need to pay
My heart's outstanding billsA cracked-up compass and a pocket watch
Some plastic daffodils
The cutlery and coffee cups I stole from all-night restaurants
A sense of wonder only slightly used
A year or two to haunt you in the darkFor a phone call from far away
With a "Hi, how are you today?"
And a sign, "Recovery comes to the broken ones"
Oh, and one final thing: I’ve started a GoFundMe to help me raise money for moving costs, etc. Any donation, no matter how small—or even just boosting the campaign—would be much appreciated.
I loved reading this and how you organized it. I was hoping for pics and you delivered. And oh boy do I relate to keeping so much and long past expiration!! I just purged a bunch of stuff too. Good luck with your move Jessie. ❤️❤️