Stuff, Stuff, and more Stuff

I have lots of stuff. I purport to be an 'environmentalist' of some sort, and I'm not sure possessing lots of the aforementioned stuff is good for my image. I've moved from clothes and car parts and old tin signs to insect collections and Hemingway-esque fishing and hunting trophies. Maybe it's my love-affair with dirt, water, gadgets, motor oil and...museums. Collections appeal to me, especially collections nicely displayed in a glass box and lit from all angles. The kind of presentation that makes a bottle cap seem special. (All those halogens brightly sparkling in an air-conditioned room CAN'T be good for our air quality, can they?)

DWR doesn't help fight materialism. They just make it neater and a little more expensive, with their simple wooden blocks carefully, artistically supporting a bleached piece of coral or a uniquely ornate shell, the entire Darwinian mess resting on a sleek shelf full of books you'll never read but bought because the pictures were arresting or served as inspiration for that dream clubhouse with the big brown leather chairs. Then there's also the recent trend of these design books, you know the ones. They like death too, the showcases of skulls and horns and fur rugs, perhaps to draw in the manlier men? Maybe. For me it's much simpler; the imagery harkens back to my childhood habit of killing things for no apparent reason really. Hey, that's what we did back then, and we know better now, but I digress.

This ornamentation...of dead things. It's the museum fetish, I'm sure of it. The Smithsonian is nearby. Lots of local DC kids have yet to go in their 10 or 12 years on earth, but me, the guy from southern Virginia...I go a couple of times a month. To see the same thing over and over. It's not just old and/or dead stuff either. The National Garden is cool too, especially in winter. Nice place to take a date I'd suppose. Either way, it's still a museum and it's still a collection. Thus, I've decided I must stumble upon some new energy source as to make me financially wealthy enough to buy a nice simple modernist box of a house (on a few pristine acres), a reasonably 'green' eco-house in which to display my rotating collections as an ode to material culture. This of course requires a large annex of some sort, probably a 3-car garage to replicate that of my parents. I don't think there's ever been a car in 2 of the sections...just racks and boxes of thrift clothes and gifts bought on sale and tools and my stuff from college. Collections of the past, objects ready for the future. Only they don't move, just like the stuff at my house now. So this spring I'm going to thin my collection. A piece by Amanda Kovattana has convinced me that is the only thing to do. Maybe I'll get materially thinner by the time GreenDC Week rolls around. It's only right, as an 'environmentalist.'