Too Much STUFF

I came to the realization this morning that I am a digital hoarder—and I suspect so are a great many other people.

The only reason there aren't intervention shows about it is because the hoarding is virtual and hidden. There are no horrific physical piles of stuff for camera crews to step over; you won't ever be found dead in your home, buried under a pile of roach-infested garbage, but I suspect the problem is just as real.

Why else would companies now regularly be shipping terabyte drives with their new systems?

I came to this realization this morning while trying to clear out my downloads folder. This is where I throw everything from software installers to cat memes and nekkid menz. When I started there were over a thousand items. I'm down to about two hundred and at the point where I just want to do the equivalent of shoving it all in a closet; moving it all into my equally unruly "to be sorted" folder just to get "downloads" cleared out. The irony is that nothing in the "to be sorted" folder ever gets sorted and currently stands at over a thousand items itself.

And don't even get me started on my meticulously curated "Menz" folder. I remember back in 2002 a friend dubbed me "The Porn King of Phoenix" when I had something like 10,000 pictures. Now I've got six times as many and frankly I don't even know why any more. Years ago when I was living in San Francisco I stopped going to the pride parades because I thought, "How many pictures of pretty men do I really need to take?"

I know some of this hoarding comes from blogging. I run across a handsome face or other interesting picture and think, "I'll repost that." Most of the time it happens, but there's a higher probability that it will simply get filed away and forgotten. I fear that if you compare what I've actually posted to what I'll culled off the internet with the intention of reposting we'd both be shocked.

Dare I say it's the same thing as my late father's habit of keeping stuff—and by stuff I mean junk—because as he used to say, "I'll need it someday."

I know without even looking that hundreds of images in my collection that are 800 x 600 pixels in size or smaller could easily be classified as junk now, simply because the resolution is so poor and need to be discarded—regardless of their content.

Time to start weeding.

Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

I'm not going to just throw all the stuff in a closet; I'm going to do the equivalent of buying a storage shed and transfer everything onto an external hard drive. Out of sight, out of mind, but still accessible if I "need it someday."

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, y'know.