In December, my partner’s cat moved in here, which effectively means my partner moved in here without most of their stuff moving in here. Now we are moving the stuff in here.

Neither of us has a truly egregious amount of stuff, but we each have enough to fill a place and a life, and of course there are also two sets of everything. So on a freakishly beautiful day at the beginning of spring, we went over to their place and donated two carloads of objects while also leaving their place in an almost-hilariously trashed state. In the meantime, I’ve been earmarking many of my own things for donation while planning a bigger reorganization of the house.

The cat’s name is Chubby Hubby, thank you for asking.

Eventually life happens, decisions are made, and you roll up at a thrift store and unload a dozen spherical garbage bags into a plastic laundry cart. The whole thing takes ten years to accrue, a day to sift through, and two minutes to unload. Who knows where it all goes.

It’s wild how we put all of this psychic weight on the things we surround ourselves with, and how it changes over time. Objects come to exist as framework for the actual things you do. Being a gearhead is a form of escapism in a burning world. You find better ways of doing things and should move on, but the optimization of it all means you get sucked in. This was text for a minute, as you know, while all of our personal transformations kept settling in as we re-found new ways of being.

Now we’re pretty settled. Nothing has changed for a while. Most new purchases have been larks, done for fun, ticking special topics boxes, which means they maybe shouldn’t really be happening. Instead, we go back to living. And someday I’ll fill a bunch of garbage bags again and feel a twinge of sadness & relief as I fill a bin and drive away.