been thinkin'

Recently I have been reevaluating my need to have and buy stuff. I have always been a collector of things. Jennie attributes this to my Taurusness. She is probably right. I always feel like items are precious and they are somehow going to go out of existence. Everything seems so fleeting sometimes. The yellowing of old school notebooks or newspapers always makes me feel a little sad, as though they are slipping out of existence, out of memory. Perhaps my Taurus earthiness translates to a stillness of time and memory that is in direct opposition to the transient and ever changing nature of our reality. Nostalgia and history always takes a back seat to progress and novelty. There was an article online about how the Brooklyn shoreline is an endangered Historical site. All of the changes in my native New York and the changes that are happening everywhere seem to be out of capriciousness rather than thoughtfulness. There is no care taken in these changes to preserve the good things of the past and make changes for the positive. It just seems to be change for possibilities sake, change because it’s allowed or easier than preservation or rehabilitation rather than out of need. Even when something comes back into style it always seems to me to be a shadow of the original, whether it’s fashion or music or whatever. It fuels an urge for the original rather than satisfies it through the new iteration. In College I studied Heraclitus’s views about the nature of reality. He believed that the nature of the universe is change. “You can never step into the same river twice.” He was quoted because everything in the universe was moving and changing, everything was like fire in his view. A contemporary of his, Parmenides held the opposite view. Everything is stillness and permanence. Any change is purely illusion and everything stays the same at its core. I side with Heraclitus and that adds to my collector-ness. If everything is change and nothing is ever the same then what happens to all of the things that I loved as a child? What happens to my cherished memories? These have always been my concerns, even before Heraclitus. The world has always seemed to forget. This lead me to keep notebooks from school even when I was in first grade I thought about looking back at my work with nostalgia, even though I didn’t know what it meant I knew how it felt. I had nostalgia about our old apartment when we moved into the house, and every house I have lived in subsequently. It is not about being able to go back as much as it is not wanting to be faithful to those memories. I still have all of my GiJoe toys in the basement of my parent’s house for that reason. I still have all of the stuffed animals I have ever had. I collect music and movies and so many things as though I will be the last repository of cinema or music or whatever memory I want to retain. Lately I have fought against this feeling. Data has become a cheap thing to hold onto. The internet and computers are creating a record of almost everything and everyone. Every email that is written, every picture that is taken, every video, every moment it seems is being held online for some future to look back on. It seems that the trend is just going to get more inclusive with Google maps documenting the world as it appears and the library project planning to put in all of the books in the national archives. This has led me to conclude that I can let go of some of my “stuff”. I will begin to unload things this year and fight against owning more and more. I will document what I let go of, and hopefully I can actually stick to it. Like a lot of the things that I try to change about myself, I try a lot and succeed only sometimes. I’ll let you know how it goes. Also in that vein I still have yet to have a Coca Cola or Pepsi product, even though the bottle sits in the office kitchen taunting me