A Little Place For Your Stuff
“That’s all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That’s all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you’re taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody’s got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff.”
George Carlin’s bit about stuff came to mind as we were preparing to board our flight two weeks ago for some time away. “Sometimes you leave your house to go on vacation,” he said. “And you gotta take some of your stuff with you. You gotta take a smaller version of your house… And even though you’re far away from home, you start to get used to it, you start to feel okay, because after all, you do have some of your stuff with you.”
Early in life we have to learn to deal with our stuff, wherever we are.
In 1986 climbing on Denali I noted, “Above all, don’t let pee bottle freeze. This is my life up here–inventory my stuff, unpack, repack, melt snow for drinks, take off layers, put on layers against the cold, unceasingly.” My preoccupations were often simple everyday details much like they still are all these years later. I am waking up and thinking about peeing, food, drink, the outside temperature, and how the new day might play out.
I wrote on, “There’s a fine balance between how much to drink at night and how much the pee bottle will hold. I feel nervous with just one and will press another water bottle into service. And what if I should fill that one, in the middle of the howling subzero night? Do I resort to using one of my boots?”
There’s always a fine line to negotiate before wheels up thirty three years later, as well. How much wine can I drink while we wait for boarding? Just enough to take the edge off, not enough to get hammered and have to get up to pee repeatedly during the flight.
Nowadays diminished hearing also adds a little bit of business to travel because I have to remember to take extra batteries with me all the time and that little wire to ream them out when I need to. Books, too, have to remember books, but which ones? Not hardcover, too bulky. Also, they have to be volumes that wouldn’t be missed if lost. Everyone has to make their own personal decisions about stuff.
The flight also drove me back to Thoreau. It’s easy to remember his ideas like want but little and how he’d rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to himself than be crowded on a velvet cushion and how men had become the tools of their tools. The classic Walden hermit curmudgeon, ranting about things and possessions.
Yet he also said it was “better to accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer.” He actually wrote that. Even Thoreau saw some advantages in the modernity of the mid 1800s.
There’s clutter in the world and also great beauty. There are men like Martin Luther King to celebrate and those whom we’d have a hard time celebrating. There are important, really big events that happen and there are common, humble, underfoot pleasures. The breathtaking and never to be repeated alongside the daily and oft-repeated. Praise be!
