Nice Stuff

I finished cleaning the apartment top-to-bottom. Twenty minutes before the 5:10 showing I sat down to write a follow-up post to the previous one about the possessions we collect and carry around through the world. I forgot to bring up the subject of "nice stuff."

People like nice stuff but I don't. I like good, durable, useful stuff, and if it happens to be "nice," too, then that's fucking great. Otherwise, I'd rather not have it in my life. I mean, I am not particularly interested in anything that must be treated with tremendous care. I am talking about objects, mainly, but I suppose I tend to get tired of people who require tremendous care, too. I am nurturing to a fault but I burn out eventually. Taking care of nice stuff is another tedious activity in a life that is already full of tedium. The point is to excise from life all the things whose care-hours exceed their return. It is quite simple. If something doesn't give back as much as it requires, cut it loose. If other people want to polish and pamper expensive vases, that's their prerogative. I, on the other hand, am not into pampering and polishing, unless we're talking about food, but even then, I am not the fancy pants cook I used to be. Anyway, nice stuff. That's the subject.

The apartment is clean. I even made some finishing touches, nice touches; but what's this relationship between the apartment and nice stuff? Ah, good question. You see, most apartment dwellers move fairly often. They jump from apartment to apartment. Some people do this every year; some do it more often. I do it about every year, and I've been doing it every year for over a decade. Now we are getting to the bottom of things. I don't want "nice stuff," and I don't understand people who accumulate huge piles of possessions because all that shit is a pain in the ass to move. Nice, fragile stuff must be handled with care, and all things must be handled. The idea is to live as trim a lifestyle as possible. To use an analogy, you want to be like a professional bicyclist, i.e. all decked out in aerodynamic speedo shit to keep your drag low. I mean, who wants life to be a drag? I don't. That's why I hate nice stuff and stuff in general.