As part of the moving-in process, I'm opening lots of boxes marked “Office Stuff” and “Random Junk” and trying to figure out if I can throw things away or if I have to find places to put it. One of the classes of object I seem to have a lot of, and not know what do to with, are keepsakes.
I have a box of keys, which is not that surprising, most people probably have this. But in this box are the keys to my first car, as well as keys to two other cars. I can identify that these rings only have these keys. Why am I keeping these? If I see my old car on the street, will I try to steal it? Or just give the keys to the owner and ask them about how the vehicle has been doing lately?
I also have a triangular hay blade that I drove over in around 1980. Slashed my tire, I thought it was pretty cool. It's in the same drawer with the ninja stars I bought in Tijuana (or probably Mexicali) about the same time. We set up a dartboard in the dorm on the back of a door and played darts with throwing stars; it was pretty fun but I don't know why I'm keeping them. I have a nice set of darts; I don't think I've played darts in ten years. Multi-sided dice. Record cleaner spray – that I'm sure I can get rid of. Old checks and check registers from the early 80s. I know I'm allowed to get rid of tax records after several years; I've kept them forever.
In the drawers of a card table we're selling, are a bunch of old decks of cards, and monopoly money. Should we throw them away? And of course a lot of this is made far more complicated by the fact that my wife is a costumer and we're both burner artists – so we keep a lot of things that seem like they might be good for a project, someday. Things like old CD cases (“these could be made into a dress”) or old blenders (“this could be used to make paper”) and old speakers and potentiometers and switches (“I might do a project with these.”).
Then there are the various levels of recycling. Some stuff just gets pitched – old pens that don't work, broken connectors for devices that no longer exist; keys that I know I don't need anymore. Old checks and financial stuff has to be shredded, of course. Paper and glass can go in recycling. There's a pile for me or Becke to put things that we don't want but we think the other might want. The pile of stuff for garage sale/goodwill sort of overlaps with the pile of stuff that should really be sold on Craigslist. There are a few things that are specialized and should go on Ebay, I guess, if I ever got around to it. The aforementioned project items take up a lot of space. Finally there are the boxes of stuff we don't need right now but can't bear to get rid of. And the stuff that we have a place for but we have too many of already has to be split up into one of the other piles.
What I'd really like is just a big industrial shredder/disintegrator/vaporizer. Throw stuff in, and it gets broken down into its base elements and/or burned to generate power. Needs to be about the size of a microwave and be able to eat things like old hard drives as well as expired cleaning solutions.