Storage

I do not enjoy elephant

Q: “How do you eat an elephant?”

A: “One bite at a time!”

No.

Thank you.

I don’t want to eat an elephant. I imagine that they are very tough to chew and their bristly hairs would get stuck in your teeth. And aren’t they endangered? I prefer a good hamburger or a chili dog.

What I want is to clear out my storage unit. But well-meaning folks keep offering up this tortured analogy whenever I mention my desire to stop dumping money into rent¹ just to keep a bunch of stuff I dragged with me from Seattle when I left in a drunken fog seven long years ago.

Self-Storage, Anywhere, USA²

This elephant-eating advice and similar pabulum comes from the grindset-mindset, cold-plunge-before-breakfast, mid-thirties, entrepreneur coterie, and I don’t appreciate the smug tenor and youthful enthusiasm of their platitudes. It feels like someone who is naturally driven has tried to reverse engineer their successful habits so they can pass on a neatly packaged life hack tidbit to us normie laggards. Noblesse oblige of sorts.

There are many examples of this brand of crap.

Do you remember the “hang in there" cat? You can still buy these if you need to fill a desolate expanse on your office wall and want to annoy your coworkers.

“Better off just letting go, little buddy!”

Insipid, corporate-flavored, inspirational tropes have never helped me. Mostly because I’m pathologically lazy and I file them in my brain under “yeah, okay… whatever.”³ Successful people appear to live by these principles and get shit done but they do so because they are just that way.

And I’m not - I’m envious of their drive. I mock them to feel superior.

Useless pap.

Except it’s not. Bothered by an idea I think is beyond stupid but which I find myself cynically repeating, I’ve started to eat. The elephant. Maybe the elephant thing is effective because I hate it so much. It’s wormed its way into my brain.

For four weekends now, I’ve spent what seem like endless stretches of time going through my storage space. So far, I can manage about two hours at a time.

Two hours is not endless.

One bite.

There’s no climate control, so my belongings have been subjected to wild Utah temperature swings and there’s a good layer of dust on everything. Weird, tiny leaves from the nearby trees somehow make their way inside. The Master lock still works, but it’s creaky. Getting inside is what I think it would be like opening a tomb. It sounds like opening a tomb. There is an ear-splitting, terrifying screech from the rusty metal of the rollup door when I roll it up.

It’s lonely work. I almost never experience loneliness any more, but something about facing the evidence of my past self, someone with different values and aesthetics, a version of me who died seven years ago, is indescribably sad. That I feel this way makes sense. This is part of the grieving process. The process I have pushed aside for so long because I knew it would be painful. A process I thought I could postpone indefinitely just by throwing money at it, when all that money spent only served to justify further investment to preserve the questionable trappings of a forgotten chapter of Ben.

So much of it is junk. A stronger person would throw all of this stuff in the back of a truck and drive it to the dump, maybe have a good cry and wish it a fond farewell as it disappeared into the landfill. There have been brief moments where I felt like I could do exactly that. Very brief.

But I made the critical mistake. I started opening the boxes. Several hours have been spent listlessly gazing at their contents and feeling feelings. I’ve sorted through some of them. The feelings and the boxes.

It would be one thing if I had packed carefully, but I was in a terrible hurry to get out of there, so every box is a mad, chaotic collection. If a box was full of old bills and only old bills it would be easy to just toss the whole thing. I wasn’t prioritizing organization in my haste.

Nestled in some of them are scraps of paper with poetry that I wrote, most of which is half decent. Some of it better than anything I’ve written sober. In a box of random knickknacks I found one of my mom‘s journals that she kept when I was 11.

There are dozens of CDs containing thousands of photos that I took when I was legitimately pursuing a career as a photographer. Photos I thought were long gone…

I have several hundred cassette tapes. I have art that no longer appeals to me. There are Mini-Discs, mostly full of original music and there are Mini-Disc players. Mini-Discs!

There are tools that I want to keep, mixed in with books, paperwork, singing bowls, bookends and magnets, power cords, and audio cables.

There’s a box entirely full of springs, all shapes and sizes, because, inspired by Arthur Ganson, I was going to make kinetic art; spring things, with cams and motors. Machines of great beauty. I had plans.

I never got around to that. Well, I did make some pretty dope robot tentacles out of a pair of bike gloves and an old umbrella, but they are nowhere to be found in all of this mess. I could probably reproduce them.

It’s discouraging to face evidence of so much promise and of dreams I let die on the vine in the throes of my addiction(s).

So I have to go through every box. There are probably thirty of them. In a month I have gone through maybe six. I’ve thrown out three large Hefty bags. I’ve thrown out books.

That isn’t nothing.

I don’t want the elephant people to be right, damnit, but here we are.

1. $100 per month for 3 years, then $150 per month for the last four. That’s $10,800.

2. They call it “self-storage”, but they don’t appreciate it if you try to live there.

3. Somewhat related: When I went through employee training at Costco for the proper way to lift a box, they provided an acronym: “THINK.” I remember the acronym, I have no fucking recollection of what the letters stood for or how it’s supposed to help you remember the proper box lifting method (though I have spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to figure out each letter - not even the internet can tell me). I never once “THINKed” to figure out how to lift a box with my legs instead of my back.