After the Afterparty

Last updated on April 6th, 2021 at 02:10 am

After the party, it’s the afterparty. But after the afterparty, for most of us, it’s time to get back to real life.

Today involved even more cleaning up, taking the possessions around the house that were once her stuff and my stuff and putting it all together to become OUR stuff.

And in this, I’ve discovered that there’s a LOT of “our stuff”.

Writing utensils and barely-used notepad stowed away in various locations. Boxes for things that likely won’t be re-boxed for quite some time. And of course, there’s always a plethora of items that we can safely tuck away in the miscellaneous category—unsure of whether or not it’ll get chucked, and just putting it aside until a decision is reached.

It’s no news to anyone that I’m of the opinion that too often, stuff rules our lives. But it’s not until you sit down and really take a good look at what’s around you that you get a good appreciation for how much we tend to rely on to justify our existences.

My father, a man far wiser than I, recommends that I take it at a measured pace, for, not unlike the construction of Rome taking several centuries, trying to undo in a day what took over 20 years to accumulate is a fool’s errand. I’m inclined to agree. While I sit here observing the sum total of where my life’s earnings have gone to, I find myself asking questions like:

• Why the hell did I buy so many buttons at that comic convention, and what the heck am I going to do with them now?
• Why do I have so many knapsacks?
• How am I going to use all of these office supplies? Maybe if I decide to write some long vampire story out by hand. Those are hot on the market right now, right?
• Is there a service that’ll pick up all of my old books? And clothes? Do we do that in Toronto? How about in Mississauga?
• I really need to stop signing up for free stuff that I’m never going to use.

Okay, that last one wasn’t a question—but I think you see where my mind’s at with these. It isn’t until you really take some time to analyze what’s going on around you that you can seriously evaluate where you’re at, what you need, and what may be distracting you from accomplishing anything of any importance.

Et voila. The crux of the argument—if we continue to accumulate blindly and not actually obtain possessions that have any value to us, we’re doomed to spiral downward into distraction and non-progression.

I don’t want to be that guy. Do you?

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