Articles by
Steve Dennie

Travel Articles

Junking Your Junk

Steve Dennie

During my first two years after college, I accumulated the following meager possessions, none of which provided a compelling reason to write a will:

• A mattress.
• Two bookcases.
• A couple lamps.
• A black-and-white TV I bought for $25.
• An Olympia typewriter, the object of my first bank loan.
• That's about it.

That year, I moved from my cheap furnished apartment into a two-bedroom, unfurnished apartment in a large complex. As the years passed, I filled the place with everything needed to make it livable and comfortable, plus an equal complement of junk.

No bachelor, I should explain, really has two bedrooms. He has one bedroom, and a junk room. The second bedroom actually serves as a giant sweeper bag. When the place gets messy or company rudely threatens to arrive, you arrange scattered junk into neat piles and transfer them into The Junk Room.

Eventually, dozens of piles lay in tumbled heaps, piles piled atop piles on the floor or on miscellaneous junk furniture. Most contain unpaid bills, magazines with one more article you intend to read, bank statements with out-of-sequence checks, and letters from Ed McMahon which you intend to return, as soon as you can figure out what in the world they want you to do.

A favorite cliche is, "You can't take it with you." That was my problem seven years later when I moved to my third bachelor pad--much nicer, but smaller and with less storage. Forced to radically dejunk, I made repeated trips to the dumpster.

I had difficulty throwing away magazines, which I had saved by the hundred--Newsweek, Harpers, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Christianity Today, and numerous other magazines. I intended to browse through them and clip selected articles (someday). Surely they contained articles which might (someday) prove valuable. But my heart waxed cold. I tossed them. I also ditched scores of clippings I planned to (someday) file. Plus, I threw away scads of clippings I had already filed, thinking I would (someday) have reason to refer to them.

Other casualties:

• Shoes I didn't wear anymore, even though they were in good shape (though I kept the shoeboxes--I just couldn't get myself to throw away good shoeboxes).
• Solo socks awaiting the return of an errant mate.
• Super-wide neckties, circa the Pleistocene Era.
• Perfectly good suitcoats I wouldn't be caught dead wearing.
• Coupons (most long-expired) for things I would never buy.
• Cans of food I would never eat.
• The boxes to things I bought a long time ago.
• Some keepsakes I didn't know why I kept.
• Conversation pieces nobody ever conversed about.
• Keys that opened something, but I sure didn't know what.
• Unidentifiable parts found under the couch, things that fell off something and languished in a drawer, patiently awaiting the day whatever they belonged to showed up and said, "Remember me? I need you."
• Records I didn't listen to, since I didn't own a record player.
• Long-replaced eyeglasses.
• Medicine bottles containing a few leftover prescription pills with strange names and stranger smells.
• Things to hang up on the wall that I would never hang up.
• Gobs of grocery sacks, receipts still lying in the bottom.
• Old suitcases with broken clasps that I didn't use anymore.
• That broken toaster oven I got for free at a garage sale and actually fixed (truly an object of sentiment for a mechanical klutz).

I don't suppose I'm odd. Accumulating junk is a natural human instinct. Monkeys climb trees. Cats purr. Bears hibernate. Dogs wag their tails. Humans collect junk.

Farmers are preeminent junk-hoarders, mainly because they have so many places to put it--barns, sheds, silos, haymows, the old chickenless chicken coop. So they save everything. Luke 12 tells about the rich but foolish farmer who built bigger barns for his crops. He probably ran out of room because of all the junk stored in his barns--like that rusted-out chariot he dug up while plowing and thought he might be able to renovate (someday) and make a little extra money.

We find ways to justify our junk.

• "It's still in great shape. Surely somebody could use it."
• "They don't make 'em like this anymore."
• "It was a gift from my best friend in junior high."
• "It might make a good gift for someone."
• "As soon as I get rid of it, I'll need it."
• "It's been in the family for years."
• "I paid good money for this. Do you know how much it would cost to buy a new one?"
• "I'm saving it for spare parts."
• "It may be utterly worthless, but they can probably use in on a mission field. They're so resourceful."

I easily found excuses for keeping books. After all, I'm a writer and might be able to use that book Ancient Nocturnal Birds of Tahiti for research (someday). But I tossed dozens of books. Expensive college textbooks which I had kept only because they cost a lot of money. Books which I'd read, but wouldn't recommend to anyone else. Books which interested me at one time, but not anymore. Books which I felt I should read, but knew I never would.

I even dumped some Bibles. Well-marked bibles I used as a teenager. Pocket Gideon Bibles in several colors. My old brown NIV Bible with several sections hanging loose between the covers. Pure sentiment caused me to hang onto those Bibles for years, even though I didn't use them anymore. But I threw them out. Gone forever. God forgive me.

We Christians hang onto a lot of religious junk, afraid to throw it out lest lightning strike as we stand before the dumpster with our holy sacrifice. We have plaques, plates, and pictures with religious cliches, often received as caringly handcrafted gifts in Vacation Bible School. An incredible percentage of them contain the words to "Footprints." Some are nice, and we hang them on our walls. Others--well, we keep them just in case someone asks, "Do you still have that 'Jesus is the Reason' calendar frame I made from the ol' hickory tree out back and gave you last Christmas?"

But material objects are only one side of Religious Junkdom.

In church, we store junk traditions, inhibitions, and conniptions. We keep the same weekly church schedule, carefully dusting around it, even though it doesn't accomplish much. Year after year we cling to the same leadership positions, the same worship service format, the same committee structure, the same expectations of the pastor, the same Sunday school curriculum, stubbornly afraid to update. We operate the way we do not because that's the best way, but because we're afraid to toss it in the dumpster and try something else.

Lifestyle junk abounds. Smoking is a junk habit, something which should be thrown away. Same with casual drinking. And junk food got that name for a reason. Some--many--TV shows and movies qualify as junk. An obsession with sports or computer games can crowd out worthwhile endeavors.

And there are junk relationships--people who dump clutter into your mind. They give you regular reports about the health and well-being of their hangnail. They clutter your thinking with gossip and inane smalltalk. They tell you about Sue Blue's office romance and remark, "What do people see in her?" They belly-ache about work and the church. They infect you with their negative attitudes, undisciplined thinking and actions, lousy priorities. Dejunk them. You'll be better off.

I wasn't proud of my junk room. When company came, I closed the door, and if someone snatched a peak into the abyss, I apologized for how the place looked. The junk room served a good purpose as a repository for my nonnecessities of life, but I would have preferred having the room neat, tidy, and presentable. Especially if Mom visited.

Likewise, there is all kinds of junk in my life I would prefer doing without--attitudes, thought patterns, negative mindsets, poor priorities, bad habits. I can hide these things from people pretty well. But my preference would be to get rid of them altogether, so there'd be nothing to hide. Then I could open wide all my rooms and closets and say, unashamedly, "This is me. What do you think?"

Copyright 2005 Steve Dennie