Since getting married, I’ve been getting rid of a lot of my stuff. Merging households with my wife means making some sacrifices.
I sold my car, my house, most of my furniture. But the most painful part is parting with half my library. When I moved into my house in 1999, I moved in with 56 boxes of books. In between the time I moved in and the time I sold my house, I doubled the numbers of books I had. On top of that I had a large music collection, a large movie collection, and a large comics collection.
I went through my entire catalog and made decisions on ‘must keeps’, ‘I can let gos’ and ‘maybes’. It was a long, difficult, and painful process. The keeps and let gos were relatively easy, but the maybes took some hard decison making. The part I’m keeping (which took up 55 boxes) has been moved and I’m working on clearing out the rest.
I had to release comics the other day. I let go of the first five issues of Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Raphael one-shot that introduced Casey Jones, and the first issue of The Fugitoid. I sold them to a local comics shop and got a decent price for them. Not as much as they are worth, but at least I don’t have to deal with arguing over the grading on each comic and the price with prospective collectors.
Letting those issues go fills me with a sense of loss. Like I’ve left behind some intrinsic part of my being, my identity. All my life I’ve always been told ‘You can do that when you’re older’, ‘you can have fun when you’ve become an adult and got a good job and can support yourself, blah, blah, blah.’ Well, I’ve spent my life working and supporting myself and all that other crap and it’s time to enjoy the things I’ve been waiting to do, and now I can’t do them. Kinda makes you question the point of it all.
Ultimately, you come into the world with nothing, and you can’t take it with you when you leave. So nothing really lost, I guess?
I guess the lesson is, if someone tells you to put off what you want in favor of being practical, or doing it ‘some day’, tell that person to fuck off and do it anyway.
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