Project Steev

Getting Ready To Go.

I leave Portland, officially "for good," in 9 days.

Yesterday I went to Ken's place where the bulk (and I mean bulk!) of my stuff is stored, to survey all my posessions and plan what I'm keeping and what I'm getting rid of and how. It's odd when I've been basically living out of a backpack for over 8 months - and basically happy that way - to suddenly be reminded, oh, I have all these things, things I haven't really missed or felt I needed, but for which I'm still responsible for. Granted, some things I will definitely need, like my dishes when I get a new place to live. But most of the things are just a pain in the ass, and some of those things I will be jettisoning, but some I cannot bear to part with. Things like the 2 cubic feet of photos I've taken for 15 years before I went digital (this year!). Or the books, all the books which I might possibly want to refer to again. The journals, the heaps of paper. I mean, really, most of what I own is just remnants of my past, which I may someday, when I'm older, want to look at when I feel nostalgic, but is totally without a use in my everyday life now.

I wish there was a safe place to leave it here in Portland, or an easy cheap way to get it back to my parents' place in Iowa.

Actually I wish I could just chuck it all. Everything but the utilitarian things that I know I will need.

Along that same theme, for the last 2 months I've been ripping many of my CDs and then selling them at a record store. This has been to cut down on posessions and also to make some money. I may have done this anyway, even if I wasn't moving and poor, but who knows when I ever would have gotten around to it? So now I am carrying around hundreds of discs worth of music on my hard drive, and in a way I'm eating my CD collection and having it too. I just have to hope the hard drive doesn't crash.

It's weird going through all these posessions that are liabilities and are signs, remnants, of my past disposable income, income I should have never had, none of us should have had, or now should have, while people starved and are starving. I have thoughts like this all the time since returning from South America last year.

It's maddening. I almost can't stand it. And of course, no one else can, either, and that's why they don't think about it. They block it out, and keep buying CDs and drinking frappaccinos. And who can blame them, really? This is the life they've been given. They, we, are the lucky ones, given a life a plenty, to act as social ballast, giving the society inertia so that nothing changes, so that a tiny cadre of even luckier ones can be and stay at the very top of the pyramid and rule the world, and none of either of these groups thinking about the even bigger group at the very bottom.

This is the world we live in.