Slate had a column recently about bloggers who make money and the author was bemoaning that when some bloggers "go pro" they feel the need to keep the visits up and thus resort to fodder like "top-10 lists" and links to viral videos...cutesy, low-effort things that are like candy to the stream-of-consciousness, internet clicking so common today. To this I say: what hacks! The internet has given us the great power to publish our thoughts with literally no gatekeepers. Those people who write online thus have a responsibility to enrich people with what they write and not resort to cheap material - stuff like top-10 lists and links to videos - simply to drive traffic, like, say CNN.
So here is my top-10 list of bad blogs. Links not provided as I don't want to corrupt you.
1. All things Pynchon (he's still alive, you know!)
2. Ye olde internette poste-ings
3. I scratch my balls
4. Pictures of our adorable (insert some ugly, annoying kid's name)!
5. On candles and cross-stitch and bald eagles and other American-country style crap.
6. Boo-hoo I have an incurable disease and my new perspective probably won't help you but I'll share crap with you anyway.
7. I like big butts (only for those willing to copiously mix)
8. My teenager hates me and thinks bad things of me
9. I, a teenager, hate my cunt of a mother
10. Ways you can scratch my balls
And look: A cool video from Norway of blondes eating herring. No, it's actually of kids building something (the special effects are pretty good...it's worth a look) and was produced by an engineering company as part of a recruitment effort by the profession.
Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the point of the post:
There are two kinds of people in this world - people who hoard, and people who shed. Well, I guess some people hoard a lot but still throw some stuff away...and there's the equivalent on the other end....and there are also a near-unlimited number of gradations between the two. So there are millions of kinds of people in the world so forget what I just said.
Anyway, I am a shedder and I'm married to a hoarder, but we work that out. Kind of. And like all polar opposites - extroverts vs. introverts, Beatles people vs. Elvis people, people who like to take abductees to remote cabins for sexual degradation vs. people who hide them in urban basements for mere psychological torture - it's hard for one to fathom how the other thinks or even operates. As a shedder I see value in almost nothing that lasts one second beyond a narrow definition of usefulness. (That bread toasted? Throw the toaster away!) Hoarders can't throw anything away because apparently to them everything may be worth something or needed at some point. Shedders hate clutter, where clutter gives hoarders a sense of warmth and grounding.
Conversations often go like this (not in my household, but in general):
"Honey, I'm throwing away this dot-matrix printer."
"No, that was a gift from my grandma for my third-grade 'graduation.'"
"Uh-huh, and why do we need it?"
"But it's from Nana!"
"You mean the woman for whom we bought a top-of-the-line color printer last Christmas? If she values this so much why didn't we just wrap this up and give it to her?"
"WELL I VALUE BEING RESPECTED AND YOU NEVER GIVE THAT TO ME."
Like I said, this is an example conversation...not from my house at all. Heh heh. But see, the hoarder, with an untenable position, resorts to ad hominem attacks.
or
"Here are some papers I'm throwing away."
"What? Lemme see."
"It's two cable bills from three years ago, a 1998 Eddie Bauer catalog, six Christmas cards from two years ago you wrote out but never mailed, and a post-it with '1994' written on it that just has a series of numbers."
"We must save all of these. Value. Papers. Comfort. Besides, the post-it must be a combination for a lock or something. You never know when we might need that."
"Combination? Are you insane?
"YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT THAT JUST LIKE YOU NEVER CARED ABOUT FIGURING OUT THE COMBINATION TO THE SECRET OF MAKING ME HAPPY!"
Again, the hoarder, in a fragile, bizarre state of mind, will make odd, flamboyant accusations. Is it a prepared strategy, to sound so bizarre as to render the opposition unable to even respond...a shock and awe, if you will, of loaded, emotional words? Or does the hoarding mind sense that losing a tactile item - the post-it from antiquity in this case - will somehow result in a part of its own consciousness being destroyed, and melts down in blabbering hysteria? Let's hope we never know.
LIFE EVENT THAT SPURRED THIS POSTING FINALLY ARRIVED AT: So my wife and I volunteered to work at my daughter's high school "yard sale" where people donated crap that they mostly never should have bought so that other people who don't need this crap anymore than the than the original purchaser can spend part of a nice Saturday browsing through it and spending money on it. So we stood there as people pulled up in car after car and unloaded junk to be sold. You would not believe some of this stuff! It was old, useless, and in some cases completely unusable. Rotting, broken, musty...I talked to the woman overseeing the clothes section and she said that people brought in used underwear for sale. Used! That part is not made up!
One might say that it was nice of people to donate this stuff for sale, as they gained nothing from it. But those saying that forget the mind of the hoarder! The hoarder would rather do anything than throw something away. It had value once, therefore it still has value. Throwing it away is some kind of sin against the universe! They literally can't throw it away without feeling bad about themselves. So what do they do...they bring it and drop it off at a community yard sale...deep down they know it's worthless, and this twisted "paying it forward" assuages their unstable consciences that they have not "wasted."
Here's the frightening thing about the yard sale. Most of the junk contributors were likely people who have donated in the past. So the round of crap we saw this year was what was left over after many of these people had already dropped off items in the previous several years! This was the "good" crap. And I stood there and watched other people come and plunk down money for this stuff and haul it away. Unbelievable. (A photo from the yard sale.) Here's an interesting nugget: The Center for Hoarding (part of the Department of Interior) was signed into creation by President Clinton in 1996 (he misheard John Podesta when Podesta presented him with the bill to sign and reportedly thought the appearance of Monica Lewinski in the oval office a few months letter was the product of the work of the new center). In a 2007 report the Center noted that 74 percent of households in this country do not need at least 80 percent of the stuff they have within the walls of their home.*
My wife and I were responsible for pricing for the sporting goods "department," where we were. Here was my revenge on the hoarders! I had the power to evaluate their junk and price it accordingly. I began to put a $5 sticker on a croquet set as a woman dropped it off. She said, "This was $60 new." My blank stare acknowledged her contribution, and I then firmly put the $5 sticker on it. Ha!
There was this one sleezy looking guy (dirty, pony tail, slovenly-dressed) who kept walking by each "department" of the yard sale and would try to "chew" us down on price. (Note: I really don't know what this expression means and I think it might have to do with the automotive industry...I just remember from childhood that every time my dad would go by a new car he'd talk about how he was planning to "chew the guy down." Maybe it means that like you're "gnawing" someone's fortitude away or something. If anyone has any thoughts on the etymology of this phrase, I'd be curious to know!). He would try to get us to take much less for certain items and tell us we were overpriced. Because he was probably right, we'd usually knock the price down. He carried loads and loads of junk to his car, leading us to think that perhaps he was an ebay seller. Beautiful...our little yard sale would be enabling hoarders all over the world! What a shame. Did you know that the Internet Vendor Tracking Association says that ebay sells $400 trillion (yes, trillion) worth of goods that will end up merely sitting in storage within six months of purchase.* What a waste!
It's so bad in this country that look at the industries and businesses that have popped up and been successful in the last 10 years. The Container Store. Manage and store your crap. A Container Store survey recently revealed that 80 percent of the items purchased from their stores sit unused in big piles in the corner of the purchaser's bedroom.* Delicious irony. Maybe I should start a "Contain Your Containers Store." Bigger boxes to store all the empty boxes you bought where you're not putting your stuff. And look at all those junk-hauling places. 1-800-got-junk and the like...we're so out of control with hoarding and junk in this country people are getting rich just by hauling it away!
So there you have it...my rant against the excesses of hoarding. Please, if you find yourself hoarding, stop! Throw it away. How to know if you are? If you currently have seven internet explorer windows open and each one of those has 12 tabs started and you never restart your computer because you'd "lose" all that stuff (take a second to look), you just might have a problem.
* If you find any of this to actually be true, it is a shocking coincidence.
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