What We're Willing to Part With

“It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly”
          -Bertrand Russell

Holy sh*t this is a lot of stuff. Somehow, piling it all in our living room only makes it seem worse. If we could just set it all on fire we probably would, but we're in an apartment, and that might upset our neighbors. Maybe if we just set our neighbor's apartment on fire then it would spread to our place and no one would know it was us, but I digress.

I've been in Seattle for the past three years. My time here hasn't been bad; I held down a great job, I found myself a pretty lady (hi Cora!),  and together we managed to fill a two-bedroom apartment full of all the things you're supposed to have as two full-fledged adults living in the city together. We kept that up for a while. Now, finally, all the stuff... all those things you're supposed to have, we've gotten rid of them all.

The furniture wasn't hard. I didn't have a lot of sentimental attachment to any of it, and almost all of it was mine before we moved in together, so out the door it went. We sold what we could and donated the rest. The photos came out of frames and went into albums. The books, vinyls, guitars, clothes, these things we packed into the pickup, and the rest, at least most of it, went by the box-load to Goodwill. It was getting rid of the food, however, that was probably the strangest thing. Not that we threw out any "starving kids in China could really use this" kind of stuff; we donated what we could. No, it was the less-than-usual ingredients, like so many quarter-full bottles of fancy vinegars and flavored syrups; too old and used to give away, yet too unnecessary to take along on our trip. These sorts of things had to go down the drain. The entire process, from giving notice at my job to getting in the truck and hitting the road, was much more work than I ever thought it would be ("Hey! let's just get rid of all our stuff and run away together!" -me being naive), but in the end it's been nothing short of liberating.

What we're left with now is a truck full of our clothes and favorite possessions, a housecat, and just enough gumption between the two of us to go gallivanting around the country together on a shoestring budget.

... I'll let you know how it goes.