I have too much stuff. Our current rental apartment is
half a three story home near downtown, but the third floor is unusable,
as it was left unfinished for some reason. The cats have both figured out how
to get up there, and I am told they do no (further) damage, but I don’t
trust the rickety looking stairs enough to ever go up there myself.

Even utilizing only two floors, I think we still have more
square footage than we did in the house we last lived in. But it’s still not enough space for all my stuff,
including a few thousand comics and maybe three hundred books. Five
years ago I probably had close to ten times that many books, but sold
off any I didn’t ever plan to read again or that had no sentimental or
utilitarian value. (You’ll have to pry my copy of The Elements of Style
from my cold, dead hands.)

I also have a large collection of action figures that
remind me pleasantly of my childhood, and about 400 of those are packed
away in boxes; nowhere to display them. I do have a couple dozen on
display in my room, and maybe a dozen adorning my desk at work, where we
can express ourselves in how we adorn our cubicles.

My collection of stuff is not just physical. My MP3 collection is currently approaching 20,000 files
taking up nearly 200GB. I have them on my laptop and backed up on an
external hard drive, with about 10GB of faves on my phone, which I
listen to at work when there’s nothing on SiriusXM that I am interested
in. The music that resonates most with me these days is melancholy and
alienated. Make of that what you will.

Those 20,000 MP3s represent about 15 years of
effort in finding the music I love in the highest quality files I can
find. So there is probably about 20 percent of it that are duplicates,
which I am sure I will never find the time to delete. I have way too
much stuff, and way too little time. I have become keenly – almost
painfully – aware of the passing of time, in the past few years. Every
day goes by so quickly now and almost always I can look back and wonder
why I wasted this hour or that doing something that was a waste of however much time I have left. Weekends that used to seem to last a month now seem to whiz in an hour. The great chef Marco Pierre White says about cooking, “Time
is not your friend.” I suspect he is not just talking about cooking,
though. (He also likes to say “Fingers are for burning.” I think that one is just about cooking.)

What I wouldn’t give to have back even a fraction of the
time I wasted from my teens through my 40s. Here at 50, I finally know what
it is worth, and I feel like I have almost depleted my stock of it just
as I realize for the first time how valuable it is. I’d risk a trip up the stairs to
the third floor, if I thought I could find an extra hour or two up there.