A week's insanity....

Some weeks are a firm reminder of why I chose to live with only a little....My job is to help people.  It is a job I enjoy greatly but in many cases, there is little I can do.

Monday: I visit a large storage unit loaded with items of absolutely no market value...mildewed clothes, rusted pots and pans, broken furniture, Tupperware with no lids.  This is one of four units that have nearly the same items.  Gentleman had claimed "there are some really good things in there".... We check...not a chance.  I recommend a bobcat and a dumpster.  Four units times about the five years each has been a trash receptacle.  That's a lot of rent...get out your calculator...

Tuesday: Visit a home whose interior defies description. My guess is that living conditions are far better in distant third world countries during a famine or infectious disease outbreak.  I can't see the floor... it is covered with an odd conglomeration of old food, clothing, cat hair and ten thousand personal items.  I see half a laptop, about a half dozen remotes, a chair leg....Anything that was of value has been used as a scratching post, a chew toy or is stained or broken.  Looks like a year's worth of frat parties occurred and nobody bothered to clean up after each.....there's nothing salvageable of the five or so items they WANTED to sell.  The seller's felt the other 9,995 items should be scraped off the floor, boxed and transported to their new home because they might need them....Sigh.

Thursday: Visit to a hoarder extraordinaire... A woman who has kept everything she ever bought for the last two decades.  She is aware she has a problem, but seems powerless to rein it in.  Just last week she spent over $3,000 on QVC.  She has three large outbuildings filled with items, many of them never removed from the packaging.  I have to explain that she has grossly overpaid for all the items and there is no hope she can recover an amount even close to the price she paid despite the claims on TV that these items are of "heirloom quality."  Just not on this planet.  She stares at me blankly.  She doesn't understand why this is or that she has fallen victim to the band of thieves that hawk garbage on TV that can be purchased with only four easy payments plus processing and handling.

This is our culture....we are taught that the acquisition of things defines us, makes us worthy.  In the end, it is acquisition that weighs us down and wastes our time and resources.  I come home, still sneezing from cat dander and decades old dust and collapse on the sofa feeling utterly defeated.  The "stuff" has won this week.  It has silently infiltrated our homes and wedged itself firmly in our closets and outbuildings like some unseen squatter.  It is not easily dislodged.  Maybe next week.

Yup...For most people it doesn't look like this.  There's an abundance of CRAP out there...