![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Acquisitive
Dec. 3rd, 2003 01:34 pmI don't know how to deal with my penchant for possessing things. I am still madly organizing the 12 gigabytes of mp3s that I collected in the last five years, trying to turn them from an unusable mass of forgotten data into a usable collection of CDs, correctly labelled, sorted and catalogued.
This huge effort is a perfect example of the dangers of acquisition. Of things. In the past 6 months, I have probably spent $400 on comic books and more than that on things to beautify our home. What are the limits of appetite? I have also watched 50 movies in that time and imbibed a dozen books not to mention thousands upon thousands of LJ entries.
I sometimes feel like the man who has collected so many bottle caps that he had to move. It's shelf-space, it's attention. What is it all for? Obviously I have enough music to last me several lifetimes. There are enough books on my shelf, read and unread, to satisfy for years. And what am I hoping to learn from collecting the tribulations of strangers' lives online?
Exercises! I collect stretches and strengthening exercises all the time and my routine grows longer and longer, morning and evening. Then I sort data and burn it onto CDs and fill up binders with it all day. Then I sleep and start again.
What would happen if I stopped? No new tunes, no new books, no new friends. Just look inward to that which has been amassed and then create from that storehouse. From that magma.
I somtimes imagine a post-apocolyptic campfire, a time after the last guitar-string has finally snapped. Just singing among the ruins while we snack on baked mice and roasted roach, growing sleepy until we lie down together, share our body heat and dream of lost shopping malls.
This huge effort is a perfect example of the dangers of acquisition. Of things. In the past 6 months, I have probably spent $400 on comic books and more than that on things to beautify our home. What are the limits of appetite? I have also watched 50 movies in that time and imbibed a dozen books not to mention thousands upon thousands of LJ entries.
I sometimes feel like the man who has collected so many bottle caps that he had to move. It's shelf-space, it's attention. What is it all for? Obviously I have enough music to last me several lifetimes. There are enough books on my shelf, read and unread, to satisfy for years. And what am I hoping to learn from collecting the tribulations of strangers' lives online?
Exercises! I collect stretches and strengthening exercises all the time and my routine grows longer and longer, morning and evening. Then I sort data and burn it onto CDs and fill up binders with it all day. Then I sleep and start again.
What would happen if I stopped? No new tunes, no new books, no new friends. Just look inward to that which has been amassed and then create from that storehouse. From that magma.
I somtimes imagine a post-apocolyptic campfire, a time after the last guitar-string has finally snapped. Just singing among the ruins while we snack on baked mice and roasted roach, growing sleepy until we lie down together, share our body heat and dream of lost shopping malls.
