Advice from a grinch: throw it away!

Minnie and I are going to give each other the holiday gift of throwing each other’s crap away. We now have a pact to come over to each others’ houses and help the other to get rid of a godawful amount of crap.

I have a cubic ton of ancient tshirts. Minnie has… lord knows what but she specifically mentioned 5 tubs of pieces of fabric and then she kept remembering more and more tubs squirreled away.

Minnie is a ruthless bitch. This is the most useful quality you can have in a declutterathon. A get-rid-a-thon. Trashathon? Divestathon? What to call it?

At her own house she turns into a wavery little jellyfish wafted about by the ocean currents of her own JUNK and the emotional associations that go with it. Good intentions, future projects, nifty memories, and most horribly, the nifty memories of well-intentioned future projects from the past. She has it all. I will throw a pale imitation of her practiced sneer as I hold up her fabric swatches between two fingers. It’s nothing to what she’s about to do to my bins of completely pointless tshirts.

And the papers! The papers mixed with piles of books!

My resolution is to get rid of at least ONE 6-foot high bookshelf, along with all the stuff in it, on it, and spilling out of it.

It is also time for another brutal round of cutting the punk or ancient-dot-com tshirt slogans out of the tshirts for their sentimental value, and using the rest for rags!

I would like to go through the closet in my office. It has 4 shelves worth of riot grrl zines from the early 90s. Half of that is probably just cruddy magazines, flyers, mostly-empty notebooks, and other things that can be thrown away. It’s things that in 1994 I threw into boxes. They were in storage, then in boxes in a closet, then got unboxed 4 years ago. But I never sorted through. Oh, to have the beautiful, wonderful zines harvested out of the muck, and arranged alphabetically in neat magazine boxes! And eventually, to scan them, put them on the net, and donate the paper copies to a university library!

Don’t even get me started on Moomin’s room. It is just a wall of books and comic books, with sprinkles. And an upper bunk bed entirely filled with stuffed animals.

I am so ready! Help me prune all this stuff! I want to get rid of it and feel all light and free!

If you would like to buy a 1911 set of Encyclopedia Brittanicas I am ready to let go of them and all their wonderous, dusty pages full of incorrect details about the Aether.

Please no one give me any presents. Well, maybe a few books…