Groping Redux

In part, I was inspired to start my blog after my first encounter with TSA in November 2010. I was so furious after my first patdown at Los Angeles International Airport that I immediately whipped my laptop out and spent the next two hours at the gate writing about it. I submitted the piece to a newspaper for publication, but newspapers and journals these days are full of the sound and the fury of people disgusted by having their bodies - including their "junk" - patted down in the name of safety.

So I thought I'd give the old journal entry the light of day here. It's interesting to note that on my return trip from Africa, I was groped not only once but TWICE, first in Amsterdam and then in Nashville, TN. In Amersterdam on my way to Nairobi, there were very, very few people stopped for a scan and none at my gate that I saw getting patted down. On my return trip, however, everyone without exception was being scanned to enter my Delta flight to Memphis, and I was again a magnet for the full kaboodle. Watch out for those lady bumps, they might explode!

The danger in all this is that we begin to accept the unacceptable when it becomes routine and normal. Another step down a slippery slope.

I have no problem with the responsibility of government and air carriers to keep us safe. What I object to is the reactionary (and questionable) practice of revealing scans and patting travelers down. The Israelis, who are experts at dealing with potential terrorism, post agents and dogs in their airports. They watch behavior, which makes more sense than targeting the average tourist for a patdown, including the elderly in wheelchairs and young children. Time will show that current TSA procedures are a waste of time and money. If they're effective at all, it's only as a deterrent. Posting well-trained agents and dogs sound like better deterrents than probably unconstitutional body searches. All this may become a moot point as peak oil creeps into our lives, however. Air travel will one day  - all too soon - become a privilege of the wealthy.

Here's the original piece:

11/29/2010 Scanning is NOT an Option

It’s early. Way too early. Why do I never get enough sleep before I travel?
I feel like a warmed-over, stale cuppa something by the time I reach LAX, check my luggage, and head for my Delta gate at 6:51 a.m. for a 9:05 flight. A good thing to be in place ahead of time. Not a good thing if you don’t enjoy dragging yourself out of bed before dawn to crawl into a cold airport shuttle, and then to a long wait on a hard plastic seat.

Oh, but let’s backtrack a bit.

I knew my day wasn’t going well when the TSA security agent standing on the way, far side of the metal detectors took a good, long look at me in the security line. One of those eyeballs on sticks kind of looks.

At first I think it‘s because I carry my laptop in a backpack – ooh, ooh, the big, black, suicide-bomber backpack. Or maybe it's because my handbag looks too heavy because I have a full water bottle in it. The ozone level is so high around the City of Angels that I always feel thirsty. I yank it out and suck the water down in one long pull as I walk past a recycling bin before dumping my shoes, carry-on, and laptop onto the conveyor.

The guy keeps his eyes glued on me. When it’s finally my turn to walk through the metal detector, he channels me into no-man’s land between two scanners, slick as you please.

“Female assist on 4A, female assist on 4 A,” he says into his walkie-talkie with a bit of self-importance.

Female assist? It dawns on my sleep-deprived, senior mind: Don’t you get patted down only if you refuse a scan? If I was the jaw-dropping type, mine would have hit the floor.

Now I know what farm animals in the slaughter line feel like. Myth #1 - you choose a patdown if you refuse a scan. I hadn’t refused anything yet.

Never mind recent news reports in which people say they didn’t see anyone get scanned or groped on their trip through America’s airports. At LAX the process is so quick and unobtrusive that most people behind you don’t even notice, unless your female assist doesn’t turn up in a hot flash.

Besides, myth # 2 is that you’re holding up the line. Actually, you’re channeled in-between lines into a quadrangle between two scanners. Then, naturally self-conscious that you hit the unlucky jackpot, you twist, turn, and gaze around, wondering if TSA is going to watch your handbag with cash, credit cards, and passport, your plucked laptop, or your carry-on bag, since your stuff just went through security without you.

Why the heck does the male TSA agent call for female assistance about 10 times? How long can this ordeal last?

I figure it doesn’t hurt to throw a small, polite fit.

“I want a scan,” I say, when the young female agent finally appears from wherever she was probably been patting down someone else. An elderly woman in a wheelchair is waiting behind me, though she was there first.

When my female assist agent finally rushes up, I insist on going ahead because my belongings are hanging out on the end of the conveyor belt where other, luckier, and less karmically bereft passengers are collecting their gear.

“Why are you patting me down?”

“You walked through the metal detector and into holding. We can’t scan you now, you’ll have to go through the line. Besides, these –” the agent waved her blue-gloved hands at the scanners, aren’t working.”

“But WHY am I being patted down?”

“You’re wearing a skirt and jacket.”

I look down at my long, form-fitting knit skirt and short jacket. The outfit is so tight I could barely conceal a band-aid. I may as well have been wearing a bikini, like the highly-publicized young lady who went through an LAX metal detector a couple of days before. I wore the get-up from LAX to London last fall. When you’re traveling for over 30 hours (my kids and I had to ride the Tube and later the Arriva trains to southwest Wales), you really don’t want to wear jeans or anything that binds, because you’ll feel every little seam and bump.

“And?”

“That’s a point we look for.”

“And all these people,” I wave my hand at the line of people collecting their shoes and gear from the bins ahead of me, all decked out in baggy jeans or tight jeans topped with heavy sweaters, generously cut long-sleeve collared shirts, and sometimes tight or baggy layers of knit shirts and sweaters. Some even wore bulky winter coats, scarves, and gloves, “just sail on through and yet they could more easily conceal things than me?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “We pick people out at random.”

By type of clothing, at random. Hmm.

“I want a scan.”

By now, my short little fuss attracts a third agent, a young male who looks pained at my logic. Damn straight, his face agrees. He shuffles from foot to foot. “You want a scan? You’ll have to collect your things and go back into another line if you want a scan.”

The female agent looks confused. “You can’t have a scan. You don’t have a choice. Well, you could go back, but you’re here. Do you want a scan or not?”

“When’s your flight?” The male agent glances at his watch.

“9:05.” I have over two hours and my gate is visible just beyond security. But I want to put TSA through as many paces as they put me through. At least they care when I have to board my flight. I’d read about some rough treatment by TSA agents in CNN news reports. Rudeness, theft of personal belongings from privacy rooms, direct quotes from the TSA hierarchy that security was more important than missing a flight.

“Plenty of time if you want to go back.” He looked uncomfortable, as though no one had ever collected their things and started over before.

I glare at them both, just a little glare, not enough to get me into more hot water.

“It’s not that bad,” he said. “A patdown only takes a few seconds.”

I snivel. “Why does the world think you only get patted down if you refuse a scan? That’s the word on the street and in news reports. “Here I stand, not refusing a scan, and you’re patting me down.”

“Ma’am,” the female said, “it’s random security.”

The second male agent nods. “What do you want?”

“I just want to get on my flight, obviously.” I look the female in the eye. “You said it was because I’m wearing a skirt. It’s long, but it isn’t exactly big and fluffy.” I sigh. “Well, go ahead.”

She brightens, and the male agent takes a step back. “Hold your arms out, please.”

I do, but I don’t like it one bit. It actually feels more threatening than when I was pulled from a line in pre-metal detector days at the Kingston, Jamaica airport to a privacy room for a much more thorough pat-down than I get here at home during a war. Since they weren’t looking for explosives in 1989, it could only have been a drug search. I was amused because why would anyone in their right mind try to smuggle anything through international customs? Your chances were probably better to stash contraband in your checked luggage. Besides, there were far more bohemian-looking people than me leaving Kingston. That time, I wore a little knit mini-dress with ankle-length leggings. Sandals. No undies. When the attractive black female agent patted me down, there was definitely nada to grope but bony me, 120 pounds dripping wet. The experience left me giggling. While she had me cornered, some smuggler probably got away bigtime. I didn’t even carry the legal allotment of Jamaican rum in my checked lugguage.

But the experience of having my more jiggly and senior 135 pounds patted down didn’t make me giggle.

For one thing, the TSA agent didn’t do the patdown as publicized. No checking anything front or back, just down from shoulders to torso to the sides of my legs, then kinda sorta up the inside of my legs, bumping with one finger for a split-second my pelvic bone, where my left junk would be if I had any. I could have hidden lots of stuff in places she didn't check.

Dozens of people continued swarming unpatted and unscanned around me, all, according to TSA, potential terrorists. I didn’t appreciate being singled out for nothing one bit.

And that’s the crux of the problem. How much energy is wasted on random searches? When does security become tyranny? How much privacy and freedom do you give up in order to be secure? How many people with contraband have TSA arrested or pulled out of flight lines since starting the porno scans and patdowns?

The only one I’ve heard of so far is the young man in San Diego who didn’t want to be nuked, and didn’t want his junk touched either. He was willing to give up a holiday to fight for YOUR rights.

But I have a heckuva lot hinging around this international trip. I guess if you want to avoid having your lady junk touched, it’s better to wear pants. If you must fly and your trip is too expensive to walk away from, expect to get nuked or groped whether you like it or not.

It doesn’t make me feel one bit safer, because there’s always a way to get around each new security measure.
The best thing about my experience? Questioning authority. If I was younger, I might have been yanked out of line for giving TSA the lip. It felt damn good to be a cranky old lady.

I question the rationality of anyon who thinks it’s okay to have their junk touched without just cause. Anyone who says x-rays and groping makes them feel secure hasn’t confronted the nature of their own impermanence. Living is risky. Everything changes. We’re all going to die and some of us will die inconveniently and tragically. Nothing will ever totally guarantee public or personal safety.

I reach my hard plastic seat more morning-impaired than ever. Now that I’ll probably exhibit a mild case of PTSD every time I’m in an airport, I can take at least comfort in the fact that I made the experience as hard on TSA as TSA made it on me.

I look over at the security line. They’ve just channelled a young lady in sweater and jeans into no-man’s land. Three women in a row.

Tag, you’re it. You decide.

Oh-OH!

Just when you think you’ve reached your quota of jellyfish, life throws a few more (or a really big one) at you. But the same goes for sundogs – they just appear without reason, shining their lovely spectrum of colored light all over your eyeballs.

I was just getting beginning to feel better after the national (and my personal) malaise over the Arizona shooting tragedy. It seems like the victims didn’t die or suffer in vain, after all. There seems to truly be a lot less yelling and name-calling going on in national politics. Both legislators and citizens seem more willing to pull together now. We all have more awareness about gun control and mental health issues and how special and precious each life really is.

Two weeks later, I was settling down into a nice routine with a new experiment in my writing life: an old crit buddy and I agreed to try collaborating on some short stories. He has this incredibly fertile imagination and I have the toolbox, the literary filler, and the word-whacking polish. I’ve also nabbed an interesting telecommute job that is pushing me to use new editing skills and old.

I was zooming along early one morning, telecommuting and word-whacking, and discovered via my e-mail electric bill that my vacant home had a larger than usual fee due. Which meant pretty much one of two things – either someone had taken up residence there, which would be unusual in that people who do that usually choose McMansions and not 30-year-old trailers. That left the other diagnosis: the well pump might be running frequently due to a water leak.

I was right. The trailer is toast – very soggy toast. My writing buddy says my life reminds him of the “Perils of Pauline”. As there are all sorts of water exclusions with home insurance policies, I may not receive a thin dime for the accident. The state of my water main is a mystery, as I thought the only main was the one at the tank and pump - and because my well is shared by a neighbor, that had to be left on. Heat – well, the pipes freeze there even with the heat on.

I was crushed for a few days – who wants to lose part of an investment that is due for a fix and up for sale? I even considered moving back in later this year. But I soon recovered as there’s not a darn thing I can do about it now. The whole mystery about the water main and its unusual placement should have been solved by me before gallivanting off to slay dragons and put out fires. Old trailers aren’t worth much, though if it had been struck by lightning and burned down, I’d probably have gotten a check for a new home by now.  There’s the distinct possibility that the leak is long-term, not a by-product of the New Year’s weekend freeze, and that means I may still get that check, or some reimbursement. An engineer has made an assessment and I’m awaiting the verdict. Live and learn.

The sundogs started shining when I received a generous donation by a lovely couple who have published a New Age newsletter for many years. Avaton and Vikki of CAC in Olympia, WA rock. At the very least, if I get nothing from the insurance company, with the kind donation I’ll be able to have the soggy box pulled off the property. This is a pretty good thing. Just the thought of the donation warms my heart so much that I’ve forgotten my initial shock after the neighbors looked around the trailer.

I’d like to think that my years of donating and paying things forward have all come full circle. This is definitely a sundog moment. The writing life is like that too. Artistic endeavors aren't just about honing one’s skills. I think when you reach out to other writers and share what you learn, whether it’s through a critique group or by volunteering time to a writer’s guild, or volunteering to help children read and write in your local schools, your own writing improves in leaps and bounds. As all our lives are improved by generosity, so is our art. I suspect that all aspects of life are involved in this continuous interplay of cause and effect, that it isn’t simply our own personal efforts to succeed that make the biggest difference in our lives. It's our willingness to serve others and work with others that marks the break-out line between success and failure.

So I’ll keep muddling along, doing my do, and when I have more skills or excess resources to share, will pay them forward. I really like to see those sundogs between the jellyfish days. And I enjoy YOUR successes too.

Winter View from the Old Homestead 

Puja Robinson  © 2008

Jellyfish Day of Epic Proportions

 
I lived in Arizona for 36 years, and of those, in Tucson for over 12, and it’s the last community in Arizona where I would predict a shooting like yesterday's to happen. Tucson tends toward a liberal or at the very least, a laid-back, live-and-let-live ambiance in comparison to many conservative areas of the state.

I’d never dreamed of seeing an event so singularly tragic unfold in Arizona in my lifetime. The intended target just had to be one of the nicer, kinder AZ legislators who uses her time and influence to make a difference for her constituents rather than enriching herself by playing people for votes. The 8th District's U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, for all appearances, is a decent and committed national legislator.

I predicted tragedies in the making last year when Arizona legislators under Governor Jan Brewer’s watch rescinded a slightly more restrictive gun law and adopted a conceal carry, no permit scenario, shortly followed by the over-reaching SB 1070 “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act”. Bent on curbing illegal immigration, the act controversially stretches the U.S. Constitution and plays with Federal powers.

There are usually reasons why the Federal government gets to exert some weight and play a cooler hand, I’m thinking. Just seems to me. Not that Uncle Sam is always right, because he isn't, but Uncle Sam in recent years is at least mostly cognizant of the responsibility to assure the welfare and rights of all living inside national borders, regardless of their legal status.

I didn’t extend my prediction to include an attempt on a national legislator’s life, along with the death of a federal judge, a young girl, and several bystanders. I thought we’d see much more citizen-on-citizen crime in Arizona, especially whites and other races toward Latinos, or the senseless type of domestic violence that appears in hard times when guns are easy to reach for.

It took Governor Jan Brewer more than two hours to appear on television yesterday and make a statement – she should have been the FIRST to express grief and to decry the violence. She and other legislators who have driven this somewhat fear-based legislation and talked tough about unseating political opponents - often more to gain votes than to actually accomplish anything - got their damn votes, though it was a close election for some.

It appears that a certain type of not-so-good political rhetoric and how it stirred up people with less than sterling character and rock-solid emotional stability has brought some karmic weight upon the shoulders of the Arizona governor and legislators. In addition to this type of political rhetoric from the conservative right and maybe even the far left, there have also been many unenlightened people meddling in Arizona state politics, such as the writers of SB 1070, who stirred up beaucoup trouble from far away to further their ideology and political agenda. A pot of jellyfish does not make edible soup.

After living in Wales for a year, experiencing the political climate in Arizona’s wild, wild west is like stepping into a desert wildfire. It doesn’t feel healthy and it doesn’t feel safe. Now you can see one reason why I’m cooling my heels in S. Cali and avoiding my home in central AZ, where there are a bumper crop of fearful people who probably don’t consider themselves to be hateful, who love their families and their friends, and probably do lots of good deeds in their communities. But there is too much anger and fear in their hearts, and their stated ideology has a raw effect despite their intrinsic goodness. Plenty of truly nice folks with kinder, gentler hearts live over yonder too, but the political climate runs too hot and too heavy for my taste.

Kudos to Pima County Sherriff Dupnik for publicly saying many things that most Arizona officials, including Governor Jan Brewer, dared not say. As he indicated, “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry. . . It’s time to do a little soul-searching . . .”

Sundogs or more jellyfish? Hope springs eternal in the human heart. I’d love to think that this is the shining moment when people will pack it in, eat another bowl of brown rice and chant Om in a big bipartisan circle. But the vitriolic infection in America runs deep.

I predict the US will eventually (and hopefully very soon) shift to a true multi-party, parliamentarian type of government in which more people are fairly represented and a coalition Congress and Senate must work hand-in-hand with the people; either that, or Dems will sweep the 2012 elections after two years of Tea Party gridlock and a boatload of partisan grief. People will find that many of their extreme, rightwing legislators will not bring them the relief or the comfort they voted for and may even undo some pretty good sundog stuff in their surreal zeal to re-work the Constitution and turn back the clock.

Unfortunately, I suspect that human nature being what it is, full of conflict and obstacle, that this one incident will not be enough to calm extremists down. We’ve watched the drama of extremism play out on an international stage in the last decade and have developed plenty of our own homegrown variety. While yesterday's shooting spree will spur already sensible people to reflect and behave responsibly, many fundamentalist and hard-core, rightwing types will likely not see the light. And mentally unstable folk spurred on by outside rhetoric can't see the light.

Sadly, this may not be the end of the story, especially not in reactionary Southwestern states like Arizona and Texas. The high emotion during the mid-term elections stirred up vitriol in virtually every state in the nation, so no corner of our fair land is truly exempt from this spectre of violence, either. This incident may even inspire copycat events. Some of the hatred spewed on the internet and over the air toward government leaders, even after the elections unseated many officials, is shocking.

You notice that I haven’t focused upon the perpetrator in my rambling. In a way, Jared Loughner is a victim too, of the times, of his youth and inexperience, of his unbalanced, conceptual thought, and of the thoughts and actions of far more sane and responsible people than he.

He is our nephew, our brother, our son. We let him down. We let us down. We have some work to do, America.

My heart bleeds sundogs for my old love, a culturally diverse and beautiful place. Get well soon, Arizona.

 

Wrong Way

 Puja Robinson © 2009

Back to Re-al-i-ty, Uh Huh!

So what’s next? It’s always both exhilarating and daunting to roll up my mental sleeves and face the real world after a long holiday. And since my long holiday also included a pleasant 3-week trip to Kenya via the 2010 SLS Kenya writing gig as well as a round of Solstice, Christmas, and New Year’s cheer, the windshield of my about-face (that’s windscreens to you UK and Commonwealth folk) is plastered more with jellyfish than sundogs.

The least of  this year's new cycle was my propensity to organize my stuff, because I’ve had to deal with stuff on so many different levels in the past 18 months already. My stuff is well-organized or out of sight. And it usually makes me happy to sort it out.

The part of my stuff that brings me to tears is trying to adjust to not having my own desk in my current living situation. My beloved oak desk and antique oak office chair, which I bought for $100 and $50, respectively, at a used furniture store over a decade ago, seem to spark and enhance my mental acuity. They both now live with that giant pile of unused stuff I mentioned in my previous post.

At any rate, the desk, along with my rattan filing drawers were part of system that is now interrupted. I did move my the filing drawers into my new room last fall (one of my brothers insulted my lovely filing system and said why didn’t I throw it away and he’d buy me a new one – but what do men know – it just needed dusting off!). But without that desk and the old arrangement I’d gotten used to in a decade of experimentation with paperwork flow, I’m floundering.

At the core of this, I seem to be having trouble creating a smooth inbox / outbox system with my correspondence. The online stuff seems to take care of itself without fanfare, but my snailmail stacks and my calendar book seem to be too easy to ignore or temporarily misplace. I guess I’ll just have to literally set up a brightly labelled inbox and outbox on my file cabinet, depressing and business office-like though that is, because I can’t seem to wrap my mind around any of this even after 3 months of living here. I suppose the long break from daily reality and immersion into the world of fiction and tourism didn’t help either.

Then there’s the worry – in the back of my mind, of course – that I’m losing it. My family has members who have lost it to Alzheimer’s, Lewy body dementia, and general garden-variety dementia, so any lapse of memory on my part tends to make me wonder if I’m losing it too. This is probably a normal reaction when you’re well past 50 and looking at how the months stack up to 60 and beyond. There’s just more life behind than ahead, so the quality of what's left becomes an issue.

I say that I think all this in the back of my mind, because of course, living in the present moment without attachment to past or future is a particularly sane way to live. This brings more sundogs than jellyfish into your life. The mind is a terrible thing to waste, as the pundits say, and a good way to waste it is by grappling not only with unnecessary physical stuff but with thoughts that have nothing to do with present moment.

Again, I’m talking more to myself than to you, dear reader, so please don’t mind my rambling. Sometimes I just have to write these things down because I’m a very hands-on and writing-focused person. For me, saying things aloud or thinking about them is sort of like trying to capture clouds in jars. Writing makes things real for me. So this blog is, in many ways, just letters to myself. If you enjoy Jellyfish Day and take away something from it, then so much the better. That’s a sundog and something I can live with.

I guess I’m repeating myself here, but so be it. I’m a senior and I will likely repeat myself this whether I or  anyone else likes it or not.

Suddenly my mind jumped on the fact that this is 2011, sort of the gateway to 2012 and all that prophecy about the ascension and attendant bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

I’m going to let that thought melt away. It’s supposed to be a rather good thing to watch thoughts as though they’re clouds passing over the clear blue sky of the true nature of our minds. Or like waves on the surface of the ocean, which is vast and still underneath the roiling surface.

I figure that just the little daily issues that we all encounter are enough jellyfish to deal with. The decaying age, in Buddhist terminology, makes EVERYTHING hard to accomplish, so say my Tibetan teachers. So little things thwack you in the face like squishy jellyfish and are just as problematic as the larger world. As above, so below.

So, all this frustration is reflected in the the voice of the overworked / underpaid school administrator who rushes you off the phone when you’re trying to deal with a simple issue for your child’s education. And reflected in dealing with the tired and unhelpful clerk at the grocery store who looks like he would dearly love to get off work and go home, or wrangling with the darn Redbox machine that doesn’t register the return of a DVD.

The generosity of humans and their systems is not impeccable, particularly not in the week after a long holiday, so sometimes we have to be the generous ones instead. This means politely overlooking the rough spots. It isn’t easy, especially when public servants, whether live or mechanical, are paid to serve. It’s annoying and my tendency is to bite back or complain about lack of sensitivity or competency.

Like jellyfish, these incidents sometimes sting and too many of these incidents in one day just, well, suck. Living with jellyfish is the practice of patience and we are supposed to be grateful to those who give us the opportunity to be patient.

So I have gratitude coming out my ears.

This seems to be the stuff that New Year’s reality is made of. Though the date marks a fresh new cycle, it’s still mid-winter and the season doesn’t exactly reek of fresh beginnings even with the date 01/01/2011 posted all over the place. Spring marks the New Year in many societies, which makes more sense to me. Spring is a sundog season. Plus, in the bigger picture that I said I would ignore above, the economy is still a shambles even though rhetoric has it getting better, birds are dropping dead from the sky, and there seems to be a crisis of some sort or a war around every corner.

But this is human life and sort of the way it always is, on some level or another.

And this, my post, is the dust churned up by the wild horses of the mind that careen around at 3 a.m. So excuse me whilst I go and attempt to tame them. Thanks for your patience!

The Suffering of Stuff

The last few days of the year always seem short but tedious. The longest night of the year has passed, but you wouldn’t know it. Plus, I miss my simple life as a tourist and writer in Africa. And the simplicity of my student life in Wales. I like living from a suitcase, with just a few belongings. A houseful of STUFF takes my breath away. The more I own, the less in control of anything I feel. I don’t understand how people can own mansions with rooms and rooms full of stuff. It makes me nervous.

And that’s why it’s probably a good thing that all my stuff is stacked in a garage at the moment. I had quite the review of all my stuff when I packed my life away in boxes just before I embarked on my journey to Wales last year. I reviewed the stuff side of life again after I arrived home recently and had to retrieve a few things and searched through many of the boxes to find them. I missed very, very few of these things during my student tenure in Wales.

My packing spree resulted in culling - you know, giving tons away to charity shops and pitching an unbelievable amount into the trash as well. Even books – oh, those sacred books. No, I’d never trash a book, but I donated a huge pile to my local library used book sale, gave some of my kids’ books to my grandsons (except for the collection of every Dr. Suess book ever published, which I’m very attached to) and even tossed a few old and obscure ones into the charity pile.

What I can’t reconcile is that I tend to review and cull my stuff at least once or twice a year anyway, especially when stuff tends to overflow from closets and cupboards into living space. I didn’t think I’d find much that I wanted to get rid of when I moved last year. But I discovered many, many strange things. Like an empty box neatly stashed in the corner of a closet. It once held a big supply of millet spears for our parakeet. The parakeet died two years before and the remaining shreds of millet were deteriorating. Among many other things, I also found an almost twenty-year-old stash of cancelled checks in a box buried beneath empty boxes in my shed. These are interesting for half a minute for their historical value.You know, seeing what inflation hath wrought and what you used to buy or thought you had to have. The tyranny of stuff.

The more I cull, the more I feel like culling. I’m asking myself now if I indeed need most of the stuff I’ve stored away. Of course, I’m not using it because I’m living in my mother’s home until further notice. Further notice meaning being able to afford a separate roof over my head, meaning employment that will cover all contingencies. My current income covers paying current debts exclusive of living expenses. This is not-so-good, but we’ll leave that jellyfish alone for now. At least my octogenarian mom needs a little help and my kids need access to jobs and big-city schools.

Anyway, I consider all the stuff that many people store and never, ever use. Like people who live in the same house for decades but who have garages full of stuff they’re saving, that they just might use someday. This terrifies me. It feels very heavy to have every nook and cranny of a house crammed with stuff. I think it makes some people feel good, but I’m not sure how that works. I feel like it will all potentially fall into a big pile and smother me. Feng Shui books say that accumulation of things can potentially be harmful to your health and welfare. It’s truly a good thing to keep energy flowing through the house, and those unsightly piles and stacks impede that energy. This is stagnation, another jellyfish word.

I figure that stagnation isn’t good for creative work. Writing requires a certain atmosphere, in my experience, that's dependent upon my environment. So I keep my life and my living space as free of uncorralled stuff as possible. Not that I’m exactly a minimalist. I admire minimalists and I try to think like one, but I also tend to get attached to things with meaning. You know, photos of meaningful people and places, mementos from meaningful trips, bric-a-brac gifted by family and friends, those Mother’s Day kindergarten craft items, and so on. It helps that the world has gone digital and photos can be collected in digital albums. I don’t have as much need to frame and collect in this digital age, especially after I had almost emptied my house for the real estate listing photo and felt how liberating it was to live without dust collectors. It’s harder to dispense with the five-pound globs of clay or unidentifiable collections of construction paper that your offspring deposit with glowing eyes into your tender, loving hands on Mother’s Day.

When I deposited my entire life into a little storage room last summer, I hadn’t seen the top of my piano, refrigerator, or a bare windowsill in years. The space left just before my big move to Wales exhilarated me and gave me the feeling that new energy could enter my life. And it did.

I’ve come to the conclusion that attachment to stuff causes suffering of a particular type. Congestion, both physical and mental. Some say extreme attachment to stuff leads to being overweight, which is certainly a type of congestion. I don’t know about this because I’ve known overweight people who couldn’t give a fluff about stuff, but I have known at least a couple who couldn’t part with anything, to the point that they’d move trash from house to house and storage room to storage room. But I haven't noticed that chucking stuff makes me any skinnier. I think the upside to all this attachment to stuff is a feeling of stability, but stability of a  type that makes me feel challenged. And congested.

I find that in addition to dealing with stuff on the occasions that I’m confronted with moving it, I also tend to cull stuff on or around New Year’s, which is why I’m thinking about it today. I’ve often spent New Year’s Day cleaning out drawers or closets. This is a strange habit, but not much different than taking stock or making resolutions. But in the case of culling stuff, you get to realize the results quickly. Some people would rather nurse hangovers or watch football on New Year’s, but I like to start my new year feeling spacious.

This spaciousness also applies to writing and revision, and why this long, rambling post could do with some editing. But I'm my own worst editor and I'm also playing with spontanaeity on my blog, so I'll let the suffering of too many words be.

Maybe I should take up a side career as a professional organizer. There’s just nothing like the spacious feeling of chucking stuff (or words, when you have to write tight). So while I’m chucking and thinking of chucking, I wish you spaciousness in 2011!