Living in a Kondo-minimum

Today’s post brought to you by: a dumpster full of busted up junk

Parked in a little lot behind a row of stores that seem to always be turning over. It is no surprise to find a dumpster there. Some business seems to always be coming or going. That cycle starts with moving trucks and ends with dumpsters.

Today’s wasn’t filled with anything particularly enticing or even salvageable. What had been furniture was now just busted up pieces and parts scattered under plastic and metal that couldn’t be broken down.

I looked at it all and thought something that I think pretty damn regularly:

Man, we throw out a lot of stuff.

We do. We Americans in particular throw away an absolutely insane volume of stuff. Stuff that has fallen out of style or gotten worn or is damaged somehow. Stuff we just outgrew or no longer need. Stuff we upgraded past.

We find no shortage of reasons to throw things we once bought and paid for but just don’t want now.

There’s a place I go with my camera sometimes. It’s a hidden little body of water tucked behind an industrial park. I found it on Google Map’s satellite view. To get there, you have to drive through a lot onto a little dirt road that winds out of sight through a dirt lot and then back onto a dirt road that ends at the body of water. It is an ugly route through an ugly place to a pretty one.

The dirt lot you pass through on the way is a heavy machinery graveyard. Abandoned bulldozers and excavators and trucks with broken windows sit along empty containers all just rusting in the elements as grass grows up, under, and around them.

It always strikes me as just so… wasteful. That equipment once cost a fortune. It did hard work and had a purpose it served well. And then it just fell out of use and into disrepair and was abandoned altogether.

Somewhere along that path toward where it is now though - rusting away in a forgotten brownfield - someone else would have probably loved to have had it. Some contractor or builder or business would have loved to have taken it off their hands.

But that is not how we Americans or our businesses think or operate.

We don’t put in labor to see that useful things continue to be useful once they are no longer useful to us. We throw them out. We park them in a dirt lot and forget them.

Years ago, I went to Vietnam. The stop was part of a seven-country trip through Southeast Asia on a shoestring with my then-girlfriend and eventual wife.

Along the way, we stopped in used bookstores so I could scout for books on the religion and history of the places ahead and sell back the ones covering places we had already been. Books are heavy. So are two-months of clothes. I needed all of the latter which left room for only a couple of the former.

By the time we reached Vietnam, I had a rough list of places I wanted to see and go. Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in the south. Hue, Da Nang, and Hoi An in Central Vietnam along the coast. Hanoi.

And Khe Sanh.

There was nothing in Khe Sanh. There was literally nothing to see there. It’s just a point on the map high in the Vietnamese hill country over two hours west of Hue. We’d have to hire a driver. The excursion would take an entire day. But I wanted to go.

I just wanted to be there and soak it in and get a sense of the place.

During the Vietnam War, Khe Sanh had been the site of a US military outpost. I had read about it in a book I had picked up in Laos. It was written by an American serviceman and told the gritty story of the horrors of the war and their time at Khe Sanh.

So, we went. Hired someone all too happy for the fare.

The trip wound through deep, emerald green valleys only occasionally interrupted by small, simple towns. The road was maintained but not terribly well. It was your typical passageway through an impoverished, undeveloped country or area. It got you from Point A to B but not quickly or without occasional obstacle.

As the hill country grew taller, we wound higher and higher until we arrived at our destination.

What struck me about the countryside all the way there and especially at Khe Sanh wasn’t what had once happened there.

What struck me was just how beautiful it was. It is serenely beautiful in a way that widens your eyes and fills your lungs. It is breathtaking.

And yet, it had once been at the very heart of a vast operation of people and equipment… and war.

At its peak, 6,000 people had been stationed there.

It was a sprawling complex of simple buildings and fortifications arrayed along a landing strip constantly under fire.

At the strategic peak of the war, the base was the site of a fierce battle that stretched in into a long siege that pitted entrenched Northern Vietnamese soldiers against a garrison supported by constant bombing.

Eventually, the US military realized it was futile to try to maintain and protect the base. So, they abandoned it… but first, they bombed it to the ground. Leveled every building. Flattened every bunker and fortification. Destroyed the air strip.

The goal was to leave nothing that could be used by the opposing military.

I expected to see the skeletons of buildings. Remnants of concrete and pavement. Some visible leftover of things the earth doesn’t easily reclaim.

There was nothing. Not a stone.

There was a dirt parking lot and a stretch of dirt plowed to show where the air strip had been.

When I got out of the car, there was a mound of earth pushed up by a bulldozer’s recent activity. Something in the dirt glinted in the sun, so I went over and plucked it out of the dirt. It was an M-16 casing. I tucked it in my pocket and walked out into the open ground.

Everything else. Literally everything - every piece of twisted metal, every chunk of concrete - had been gathered up by villagers and carried away.

The rough pieces of cement that had once been a runway were used to build walls and houses. The metal had been repurposed or melted down and converted into something useful.

There was literally not one sign of what had been a vast and expensive base other than one metal shell casing I only happened to see because it had been recently unearthed and the sun had hit it just right.

And yet, here at home, we abandon whole buildings, heavy equipment, machinery, furniture…

Shifting back to the present, as I’ve talked about at length, about ten years ago, I divorced from my son’s other parent and then rode being a single father trying to keep my son’s life rock-solid stable into near bankruptcy.

When I was at my most broke, I went through a stretch where I had to constantly scramble and scrape to just keep gas in my car.

As one point, I was down to living one ten dollar bill to the next. And I was out of ten dollar bills.

So, I started looking around my house for things I could sell quickly just to make a few bucks to get me through the next day or weekend.

Out town had an active Facebook group for parents and I was on it. People frequently posted stuff for sale. I hadn’t. I was just a known commenter. So, it felt to me like suddenly selling things for $5 and $10 dollars might look like exactly what it was: desperation driven by severe financial problems.

But I needed the money.

So, I went around the house and found a few things and decided to make light of it and turn it into something people would get enough of a laugh out of to think all must be alright with me since no one would be joking around if they were drowning.

Found a shade thing in the attic I hadn’t known was even up there.

Wrote something and put it up for sale.

It sold in five minutes. So I found other stuff and sold that too.

And not only did the money help, I came to really like the fact that the person who bought it actually WANTED IT.

I don’t know about you but donating to Good Will and the like feels sort of hollowly good. You’re just dropping stuff off that will, in theory, do some good for someone somehow.

Selling things for tiny amounts connected me to the people who bought them and they’d often tell me why they were buying it.

So, I sold more and more stuff until I was now selling stuff I could have easily kept and made future use of but now knew someone else would value more and use now.

By the time I moved out of that house, the entirety of my earthly possessions fit in a 10’ x 10’ storage unit.

And after parting with so. much. stuff. the only feelings I have about it now are regret that I hadn’t shed more and contentment at how much simpler my life is without all that… stuff.

I will never own that much stuff again. I will shed things still in their useful lives and whenever possible, I’ll do that by passing them on to someone who wants them.

The day before my house sold, I was down to a collection of things that were past “upcycling” and just needed to be hauled away and a few that were still in fine shape but no one had wanted even after one last round of leaving stuff on the curb. A heavy wooden chair, a small bureau, a small bookcase.

When the dumpster guys arrived, the first thing they did was throw it all in the dumpster. And then they took sledgehammers to it all. Smashed it all to smithereens. Their job was to get the most they could into each fill. Reducing still useful things to pieces was just how that worked.

I wish somebody had taken that stuff.

While all of the above circling-of-the-financial-drain was going on, Marie Kondo came out with her now-famous book about “Tidying Up”.

I liked the concept: shed your attachment to material things that no longer “bring you joy”. I didn’t like her stiff, rigid, structured process for managing your stuff. I ain’t about to start folding shirts up some special way. There is no Zen in that for me.

I did get the power at the root of her whole system though. It broke people free of their reflexive impulse to hold on to things not because they would buy them now but because they had bought them already.

Being broke and then experiencing shedding things to owners happy to have them broke me of that too.

When my son goes away to college, I will move somewhere small. A “Just Big Enough House” if you will. I will have everything I need and nothing more. And I will keep it that way so I never again have to have dumpster guys come and break things down to smithereens because I held onto them too long.

I will never need more than a 10’ by 10’ storage unit to hold my things. In it will be things I need, things precious to me… a bin with some of my son’s baby clothes, photo albums, boxes with keepsakes… and little else.

And before I go, one last closing note to this story.

As I was moving stuff into or out of my storage unit one day, there was a man pushing a cart loaded to the point of teetering toward the freight elevator. He looked up, saw me, and then looked down and muttered more talking to himself than to me “What am I going to do with all this?”

On top of the stacked piles was a piece of painted driftwood art someone had clearly purchased on some vacation. It looked like one of those tacky decorations someone had seen during a time away on a trip that felt so special and rare and happy that they wished they could take the feeling home with them. But then they get home and the feeling wore off and time passed and truth be told, it was kind of hideous and really couldn’t stay on the mantle.

It was his parents’. All of the stuff on the cart was. They had passed away. He was emptying out their house. And it was just loaded with a lifetime of things kept long past being used or wanted.

I’ve had numerous friends go through that. It is an awful exercise. It puts grieving children in the position of having to weigh not so much the worth of things but what their worth was to their parents.

It is a shitty exercise made harder when the stuff fills rooms and attics and basements.

We should spare our kids from a painful appointment of having to sort through endless things, weigh what they might have meant to us, and then clutter up their own lives with things kept out of guilt.

I’ll never fill another dumpster again. Somewhere, there are people who will take almost everything I would have put in it. Better to find them while alive and feel good than leave them behind to make someone feel worse.

[Sidenote: I am still working on the longer piece mentioned in my last post. It is taking a longer time than I thought but that is because it is increasingly interesting to me and that leads me down some rabbit holes. I will post it in the way outlined in that last post as soon as I can.]