The Purge

Another thing about stuff is that, the more often you move, the less stuff you will have. That's because, every time you move, you leave some stuff for the next occupant and you throw some stuff away. Conversely, the longer you live in a place, the more stuff you accumulate. People tend to move more often when they're young, but it seems to get harder and harder each time until they reach a certain age when they say, "This is the last move!" From that point on, stuff accumulates until you die and it becomes somebody else's problem.

My daughter has always been a Gypsy at heart, she considers her life to be one long camping trip. Every time she breaks camp and relocates, anything that doesn't fit in her car gets left behind. Well, not so much anymore, but that's the way she lived until about the time she turned 40. Since then, she has been known to stay in a place for several years at a time, but she still spends a lot of time on the road, and she still believes in traveling light. Every once in a while, even when she's not moving, she goes through all her stuff and gives or throws a lot of it away. She calls it "having a purge". She has offered to come over and show us how it's done, but neither my hypothetical wife nor I are willing to disrupt our lives like that. We prefer to limit our intake of new stuff but, once it's here, it's here forever. Someday, when we're dead and gone, Jenny can have the purge of a lifetime, but not now.

Our stuff might appear disorganized to the casual observer, but we know where everything is. The inside of the house is my hypothetical wife's domain, while the garage, the barn, and the grounds are mine. If I want to find something in the house, I know better than to go rummaging around looking for it myself. One nice thing about being married for a long time is that you know your place which, in the long run, is for the best.

more stuff

Until I moved into my current apartment, I had never lived anywhere near as big, and never for very long either, so I didn’t have all that much crap. When I first moved here and put stuff in the closets and the bookcases and whatever, I had plenty of room left over.

That didn’t last all that long. One thing, I had just taken up art seriously, and all hobbies involve having lots of crap, and art is probably a little worse than the others because, instead of hauling the deer leftovers over to a little niche in the woods so that they can return to nature, you have to keep each and every one of your precious works of art. Lucky for me I do watercolors which stack nicely, instead of like pottery which does not.

When my mother left the family bungalow for her retirement home, my sister and I pretty much left everything in it, This was pretty smart but it was also out of sheer laziness. Maybe five years later I remembered that my mother had had a set of silver. She used to bring it out for like Thanksgiving, and I remember as a kid watching her polish it with some stinky stuff. I asked my sister about it, but she hadn’t plucked it. So I guess whoever bought the house got it. 

Maybe just as well, if my sister had taken it, it would have sat on some shelf somewhere in her kitchen, until she died and I guess one of my nephews would take it, and then he would die and so on. Is silver worth much money? Does anybody eat off silver anymore? I have no idea.

Stuff accumulates, and it doesn’t go where it is supposed to go, it goes on a table or maybe a shelf, maybe into some temporary place that becomes permanent. If you remember back when you first moved in, you had a plan. You walked around the house and you saw the space that you had and decided this would go here and that would go there. Sort of. There was stuff where you couldn’t figure out if it was this or that, and it went into some other place until you could decide where it should go, which you never did, because you have a life to live for Chrissake.

Every couple years it seems I go through all my stuff and organize it and the good thing is I always end up with extra space, and the bad thing is if I am looking for something obscure I can remember where it used to be, and I can remember that I moved it somewhere else, but at that point in the chain everything is blank. Well I will find it next time I organize my stuff. Probably.

It’s like the grocery store. Are the coffee filters with the coffee or with the paper towels? Actually they are somewhere else, and when the kindly grocery clerk points it out to you, you tuck it away into your memory, which is absolutely useless because by the time you use those 400 filters the grocery store will have decided it wants to move everything around.

I hate to say it, but the older we get, the more we get to thinking well how many more years do we have to be retrieving stuff, and doesn’t it give us a little more time to watch the sunset if we just put stuff wherever it falls, because eventually it will all fall into the hands of the kids who will whine what are we going to do with all this crap?

And anyway five million years from now the sun is going to turn into a red giant and burn everything up, and also our galaxy is going to collide with the Andromeda galaxy, and the scientists say it won’t be a big deal, but how can that be? You take a couple Ford galaxies and run them into each other and you will have a hell of a crash, and real galaxies are a lot bigger than Fords so it’ll probably be a huge crash. And anyway way down the road is the big rip which I think everything will just be tiny smears of energy in a big cold expanding universe so I guess there will be plenty of room to put stuff then.

The Law of Stuff

It's not really a scientific law, I made it up, getting my inspiration from Boyle's Law. Like gasses, your stuff will expand to fill all available storage space. The only way to limit the amount of stuff you have is to limit the amount of storage space you have. If your garage is full, don't build another garage, not even a shed or a lean-to, because your stuff will soon fill that new space up, and you still won't be able to get your car into your garage.

My father was like that. After he died, my mom spent the last ten years of her life trying to get rid of all his stuff, and there was still lots of stuff left for my sister and me to get rid of after Mom died. My sister took care of most of it because she lived closer. She spent the better part of a year on it, and I still had to haul a couple truck loads home after Sue had disposed of all that she could. Among this stuff was all my report cards and course books from school, as well as all four yearbooks from Gage, the brick-a-brack from my ROTC uniform, and various other school stuff that I had totally forgotten about. I told Sue that I didn't want any of that crap, and she said that she didn't want any of hers either, but that it didn't seem right to throw it away because it must have meant something to Mom, seeing as she had saved it for all those years. So it came to pass that I built a set of shelves in the garage to hold several plastic storage bins full of school stuff, which are sealed with duct tape to keep out the dust. The bins only took up the bottom shelf, but the other shelves soon filled up in keeping with the Law of Stuff. I have not built any shelves since then, and we haven't accumulated any more stuff since 2003.

I only got sent once to Mr. Stevens (or was it Stephens?). I'm sure I told you about the one fight I got into at Gage. I got suspended for two days, but it was worth it because nobody ever bothered me again. There was one other time that I went in voluntarily to stand up for Nick Komarchuck who had been violently attacked in the cafeteria by one of the hoodlum element, but I'm sure I've also told you about that one. I did hang around outside the office for a year or two working for Mrs. Jordan, the career counselor, in lieu of study hall. There was a library table and chairs where several of us sat for 40 minutes a day in case Mrs. Jordan needed us for anything. Mostly what we did was tabulate data from aptitude tests. We would take all the scores and calculate the mean, midpoint, and median for each group. Then we would make a graph and sketch a curve, which was supposed to come out in the classic statistical bell shape. If it didn't, Mrs. Jordan would shake her head and say, "Isn't that a funny looking curve?" Mr. Stevens usually closed his office door when he was in there chewing somebody out, but he would occasionally forget that we were there and leave it partially open. The guy was like a machine, he had a pre-programmed response to any excuse a kid or parent would come up with. Looking back on it, that was probably the only way to handle a job like that effectively. If you tried to be reasonable, people would just take it as a sign of weakness.

just a year and a half away

I still have my old coursebook, do you remember that? Brown, about five by eight inches with grids for the classes and the grades at four grading periods. And those odd grade signifiers, S, E, G, F, D, while the rest of the world had A,B,C,D, and E, when I went to college and told my parents that I was getting an E in chemistry they were delighted. Anyway I should get it out and figure out what history class I had. I know I had a year of history at Tilden before I went to Gage Park, and then I had Arvin and Parker at Gage Park, I don’t know how I got to have Sears.

I was down to the office several times, I think my mother had to come in a couple times, but I never got suspended. I don’t remember who I faced. What did you have to go to the office for?

I don’t remember that atheist thing, though it sounds like something I would do, I was quite the militant atheist, but I have mellowed. These new atheists who want to fight religion are a little on the crackpot side if you ask me. I think they mostly blame religion on all those wars, and I rather feel that if it hadn’t been for religion we would probably have found some other reason for fighting them, and the whole subject has been talked to death. It’s kind of like crossdressers, as far as I am concerned, dress like a woman, or don’t dress like a woman, just don’t bore me with a long explanation of why you do either. The same with religion, believe or don’t believe, but don’t go on and on about it.

I still think we were pretty much home free, as far as anybody conquering us. We were far away, and we didn’t have that much that anybody wanted, some furs and tobacco I guess, and I’m sure the world knew we were a bunch of soreheads.

Maybe we didn’t have a parliamentary system because the colonists hated political parties. Coming off a war, especially a winning one, people are pretty united, and maybe they thought there weren’t enough differences between them that there would be political parties. For all the glory we heap on their bewigged heads, I think we have to admit that their idea that they could dispense with political parties was bull goose loony.

I think this whole email thing is a little weird. When did it become law that people in office had to turn over all their email? I don’t think they had to turn over all their snail mail, or that their phones were regularly tapped. They archive presidential records, but those don’t get released for years. How did it become law that any committee investigating anything can demand to know everything you ever said? And don’t we want a little secrecy in gov, just so it will run smoothly?

Having said all that it is a little weird to have your own personal email server, and then the answers she gave were all a little shifty, not quite answering the questions, shifting this way and that like the magician’s wand before he pulls the rabbit out of the hat. That Hilary, there is the shortest little pause before she answers a question when you can see the gears turning and then when she begins to speak every instinct within you screams out, she’s lying, she’s lying.

Having said that I will still vote for her before any of those pygmy little republican candidates who can only squeal what everybody around them squeals, and don’t even have the guts to admit that Obama might love his country.

And the election is only like a year and a half away. Oh my.

Free, But Not Home Free

Now that you mention it, the names of Mr. Parker and Mrs. Arvin sound familiar, but I don't remember taking any classes with them. When I think of history classes at Gage Park, all I can recall is Fred Sears. We called him "Fred" behind his back, but of course it was always "Mr. Sears" in his presence. Fred had the reputation of being a mean prick because he sometimes filled in for
Mr. Stevens. Remember him? His official title was "Attendance Councilor", but he was basically the discipline guy. Willie P. Hearne was the principal, but we seldom saw him except at assemblies. When you got sent to the office, it was Mr. Stevens that you had to deal with. Fred Sears was a lot easier to take as a teacher than as a discipline guy, but he still had kind of a haughty personality. He frequently played "devil's advocate" in class discussions. He would pretend to advocate a position just to see if anybody could intelligently challenge it. Of course I was one of his favorites, and you must have been too. I seem to remember that you said you didn't remember Fred, but you must have been in at least one of his classes because I distinctly remember you presenting a report on Atheism as part of our "Great Religions of the World" study. You reported on the book "This Believing World" by Isaac Azimov. I read it myself years later and, I must say, it made a lot of sense.

When I think of American History, the only teacher I can remember is Mrs. Baker at Sawyer. She was an old fashioned patriot and proud of it, a big fan of the Constitution and the rule of law. She was no fan of FDR, but she dutifully taught us the politically correct version of him from the textbook. Then she told us to close our books and told us what the opposition had to say about FDR. She didn't try to recruit us to the opposition, she said that she just wanted us to know there were two sides to that story. When I went to my sister's graduation ceremony, I learned that Mrs. Baker had recently died and they dedicated the whole program to her memory. Too bad, I would have liked to hear her take on the Vietnam Era.

I don't think that the American experiment was "home free" after the revolution. There was the War of 1812, which the British won on the battlefield, but they let us off the hook because they had decided by then that they'd rather have us as an ally than an enemy. Then there was the Civil War, and everything that led up to it and followed it. Meanwhile, Napoleon was running roughshod over Europe. That kind of turned in our favor when France conquered Spain and subsequently sold us the Louisiana Purchase for cheap. I don't think they had any plans for it, and probably didn't even know how big it was. Too bad for them! The more I think about it,  the Napoleonic wars might have been what saved our bacon. Those guys were so busy fighting among themselves that they didn't have time to bother picking on us. If it wasn't for that, we might all be speaking French, or Spanish, or even English today.

I'm not sure why we didn't end up with a parliamentary system like most of the world's democracies. I know that the Founding Fathers got some inspiration from the pre-empirical Roman Republic, and maybe the ancient Greeks. The British had a parliamentary system, but they also had a king who still had some real power. Maybe our guys, wanting to avoid that, decided it was easier to just start over from scratch, take a little of this and a little of that, and put their own spin on it.

I saw something about Hilary's email scandal today on the news today, sounds like a tempest in a teapot to me. If she gets elected president we'll have a lot more than email to worry about. It's hard to imagine a worse president than Obama but, in my experience, nothing is so bad that it can't get worse. So far the Republicans have got, like, nobody. Rand Paul is fine for a protest vote, like his daddy before him, but he'll never get elected. It has occurred to me that John Boehner might not be a bad choice, but I don't think he is even running, at least not yet.  

american history

I guess we didn’t have US history in high school. Funny because we had that Illinois constitutional, or whatever it was, test, where you had to memorize a bunch of really boring facts which you forgot as soon as you spat the answers out at the test. There was that course you could take to get college credit by Mr Parker, which was certainly not critical of the US, but it was pretty neutral, and I remember being impressed by it. Mr Parker lived in Hyde Park and took a bunch of us out to hear a bluegrass band (at the time I was bored silly because it all sounded the same), but anyway I realized later that Mr Parker was a liberal. Imagine that, a liberal at Gage Park. I remember that Mrs Arvin was a big fan of FDR but I don’t know if her political opinions went further than that.

Once we fought off the British, we were pretty much home free because we were so far away from anybody. I believe there was a sizable contingent in parliament that was for our independence and I keep meaning to read up more on them, but I still haven’t. I believe WW I was when we became recognized as a world power. Woodrow Wilson went over there to straighten them out in dividing up Europe and made a fool of himself, and then when he came home his own people dumped his league of nations.

I think the main reason we got a leg up on our southern brethren is that our settlers were somewhat educated European types whereas down continent they had those unsavory Spaniards.

I don’t know if 250 years is that long for the history of a nation, and then if you consider, most of those South American countries have been around about that long, and most of them are not that much to speak of.

When I was thinking of our bewigged feather-writing founding fathers I was thinking what if we had a parliamentary system like most of the world has. I’m guessing we would have libertarians, tea partiers, establishment republicans, conservative dems, liberal dems, socialists, and a few commies, probably a green party too. Our leader would be the head of one of the parties and not the fresh faces that we have to have because we hate career politicians.

Speaking of career politicians, I think Hilary might be in big trouble. It’s not that the emails are that big a deal, but there is this after that, and there is her annoying coyness about whether or not she is running (of course she is), and just now I read that she is going to make a statement, ‘sometime within the next few days,’ is that what a person with nothing to hide says? We don’t have much in the wings, but that’s because they’ve all been afraid of Hilary, once the queen is gored they may be coming out.

We’ve had three days of nice weather, but tomorrow the winds are going to be coming out of the east which is no problem for the Gage Park neighborhood, but those of us on the lake are like twenty degrees colder. But even with that, it’s better than it has been.

United We Stand

I don't recall taking any American history classes at Gage Park, but I got a lot of that stuff in elementary school. Of course they gave us the sanitized age appropriate version. I've learned more about it on my own over the years, but that's just because I find it interesting. I never really studied it, just picked up bits and pieces here and there. I've probably forgotten more history than most people have ever learned. That's the problem, I've forgotten it, but I understand that a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age. What ever did we do before Wikipedia? National Geographic is good for that too but, as you said, they don't give a lot of the details.

When you think about it, it's pretty impressive that the U.S. survived at all. We've certainly had our share of controversy, and more than our share of violence. I don't think that the U.S. was regarded as a world leader until the 20the Century. Before that, Europeans referred to us as "the American experiment", as if they expected us to fold any day now. We could have ended up a collection of banana republics like South and Central America, but we didn't, and Canada didn't either. Maybe you're on to something with your northern versus southern theory. Look at Africa and the Middle East. Maybe all that heat cooks people's brains and makes them cranky.

Of course the Founding Fathers disagreed a lot, but they were somehow able to cobble together a nation that has stood the test of time. Did they know what they were doing, or were they just lucky? There is an old deer hunter's proverb that says it's all about being in the right place at the right time. Of course you can still blow an opportunity but, if you're not in the right place at the right time, you won't even have the opportunity.

Speaking of heat, we got up to 50 today, after plunging to 10 last night. The good news is that it was only 10 above, not 10 below. Of course it won't last forever, but it's supposed to be nice all this week and, by then, we'll be halfway through March. How much more winter could we have left by then? A month, six weeks tops. I can do that standing on my head. Not really, that's just an old army saying.