Want some insight into your relationship with possessions? With your history of consumption and hoarding of clutter?

Plan a move to another country, where the most you can practically take is a small stack of cartons.

Look around your house. Your garage. The attic. Look in every drawer, closet, kitchen cabinet, bookshelf. Now imagine yourself touching and deciding the disposition of every item, large and small. Lots of stuff in that junk drawer? Gotta decide - dump the entire contents in a yard sale or thrift store box, or sort through trying to apply some criteria for saving or...or....or what?

Attached to that couch you nap on? That big leather armchair you longed for so many years? Get over it. Everything must go.

With a yard sale staged for the purpose of seeing things go away quickly, it's best not to give any thought at all to what was paid for stuff. It doesn't matter. Everything must go.

At first, it's very tough to sort, to sell, to (gasp) throw away perfectly good stuff. But it gets easier. And easier. You start out tentatively, giving a lot of thought to every little item. Before long, you can gather up arms full of stuff, and dump it unceremoniously into boxes. It becomes less painful, and you actually start to get an endorphin high from the prospect that it will all finally just...go away.

You find yourself thinking, as you wade through the endless drifts of stuff - Let this be a lesson to me. I never needed all this crap to begin with. I thought I did, but I didn't. I worked a lot for the money to blow on a mountain of swill, and then it owned me. For a long time. I moved it, looked at it, occasionally dusted it, but rarely used most of it. Never again.

The best model for consuming was revealed in a scene from George Lucas' first theatrical release - the futuristic THX1138. In the grim opressive overcrowded underground Orwellian world that the hero inhabits, he ducks into a shop and purchases an orange cube of some sort. When he arrives at his dwelling, just inside the door he deposits the cube into a receptacle, where it vanishes with sort of a sucking flushing noise. Perfect consumption. No clutter. Everything must go.




Text © 2003-2004 Stanley J. Wolf

Almost three months since my last update, and it's time to bring this up to date and move forward with ongoing status.



After the New Year kidney stone incident, a CT scan done to have a look at that situation revealed another area of interest. A subsequent study of that area revealed ANOTHER thing to investigate. I won't bore with the details, but the past several months have been used up by long delays between appointments with various HMO (which I believe now means Hysterical Medical Overindulgence) people and for being scanned now and then with Xrays, soundwaves, and magnetic fields. The net result of all this is that the original kidney stone episode has resolved with minimal unpleasantness, but some uncertainty still remains with the other incidental items. Hopefully, that uncertainty will be removed in the next few weeks.

With any luck at all, I will then be able to travel to Merida by mid to late April. Pat is there right now, beginning a ten-day visit to scout the neighborhoods most likely to yield appropriate houses and ambience now that we have expanded the scope of our search beyond centro. He will take one more look at the current inventory of casas for sale, and if there is no good opportunity we'll shift to looking for a rental in one of the neighborhoods he's checking out.

Here's a place to check out local Merida listings for venta de casas (houses for sale) and renta de casas (rentals). Note that although the $ sign is used, unless USD is stated this is for mexican pesos - currently you divide by eleven to arrive at a dollar amount. Here's another site for current house inventory targeted more to gringo buyers.

There really is a lot of catching up to do, and (hopefully) the pace of preparation and action will be picking up soon - I'll commit to no less than three entries a week.

Stay tuned...

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