Where it began: a hoarder is born

Junk.
It began with junk.

Honest. JUNK.

Remember that 70's television animated show "Fat Albert?" Those city kids that played in a junk pile? That was my fantasy. As a kid, I visited a relative in New England who owned a junkyard and thought I had arrived home at last.

Despite my parent's best efforts, I was a packrat--my Dad coined it "junk collector." I considered myself to be on the higher echelon of junk collecting--I was quite particular which pieces of trash I wished to include in my sophisticated assortment of marbles, electrical components, metals bits and random pieces of plastic and rubber. T

here was no need for elaborate play sets when my pile of junk could be configured into whatever world I conspired to create. My particular favorite was a M*A*S*H unit that I would spend hours setting up, running and bugging out. [At least I can say that my toy solders were performing imaginary life-saving service that even the most liberal, hippy parents would approve.]

But there was a dark side that no one warned me about.

I became attached to my junk. Emotionally attached.
So much so that it became harder and harder for me to part with even the smallest component of what others would consider trash. And let's call it what it was: trash. My junk collection was often what others discarded, and on several occasions I came home with happy additions acquired in the alley that ran between my childhood home and my nearby grandmother's house. I shudder to think what I might have come home with had I been a child in these times.

The addictive/obsessive/compulsive gene runs in my family, and it didn't take long before my penchant for acquiring and storing unnecessary things became an issue with my mother, who by early standards, was what we are now calling a "minimalist." She was almost militant that if it didn't fit, didn't work, didn't get used-- it didn't belong in the house. My response was quite rational: hide the junk to avoid it from being discarded.

There was no threat more potent than "if you don't [fill in the blank], it's all going into the trash ..." As a teenager, I had recurrent nightmares that my Dad would carry out his threat of throwing out my entire collection of heavy metal concert tour shirts while I was at school. This engendered a new compulsion--trash diving any time I misplaced an object, out of fear that it was now in the trash. That, of course, led to my next newfound hobby: not only digging through the garbage, but actively searching the garbage to pull out items to add to my own.

When I went off to college (art school--where trash diving, incidentally, is encouraged, almost required activity) I could only bring what would fit in the trunk of my parents sedan. This required a careful selection of items, balancing what I truly needed and what objects I felt gave me comfort. Living in a space approximately 50 square feet (half a small dorm room) was suddenly liberating. It was easy to keep clean, easy to find everything and there was an odd lightness that only those who have experienced the unburdening of objects can truly explain.

During my junior year, I took a 3 month "sabbatical" to San Francisco, where I found myself homeless, jobless and broke in a matter of days. An old college friend allowed me to store my two suitcases at her place and I lived out of an old army rucksack. When I landed a sublet in the Mission district, my so-called furnished room consisted of a small dresser, a closet with two hangers, a piece of marble stolen from a construction site (bedside table), a single lightbulb swinging in the middle of the room, a candle, and a large piece of foam (to this day, they won't tell me where it came from. Ignorance is bliss. or in this case, rest.) And it was perfect.

I had only what I truly needed. There was no room for excess and no money to buy anything else. My creativity flowed unlike anything I had ever experienced before and I decided that the nomadic life of less was for me.

Or so I thought.

My parents sold my childhood home, and when the call came from my mother, I held the phone, trembling, nauseated: what about all my stuff that I left behind? My girlfriend was moving out to California to join me, and they'd give her all the "prized possessions" that I could rattle off the top of my head. My mother's argument was undeniably sound:
"If you can't remember what you left behind, why do you really need it out there?"

And yet, like most packrats, when the "goodies" arrived, I was too pre-occupied with what hadn't arrived, rather than taking joy in what had. It was a near panic--what's missing? where is it? how could she throw it out? can I replace it? where? how soon? The trunkload was about to become a truckload.

More to come...