A Debate on Throwing Stuff Out

On the occasion of my 3rd (+21 years) anniversary

On this, my third marital anniversary (+21 years of additional un-wedded cohabitation) I thought I would honor the union by presenting the one and only essay I have ever written with my now husband. It is about the stresses we were facing trying to merge our two cluttered households.

Before he moved in, I had vowed that I was done living with men without being married. I also did not have any particular desire to get married, period. (This is something I have written about at length in this very substack in my legendary (to me) SEVEN(!) part series, “Why I waited 22 years to get married.”) (You can find the various entries in the archive. For example, here is part 5. Here is part 6.)

ANYWHO, when it was finally decided that we should merge households, it was mostly prompted by the fact that we live in Los Angeles where a cross town drive from Silverlake to Malibu is almost always a traffic encumbered blood-pressure rising ordeal. We had been doing it for a couple of years. And familiarity was indeed breeding contempt. Add to the usual irritants the fact that his version of the drive also included two dogs and a boxed up cat.

Naturally, because I am me, the dogs and the cat all moved in with me before he did (bringing the household total to six dogs and a cat, for those keeping score.)

Anyway, we originally wrote this piece for a reading series in which I was a frequent participant. It was hosted by The Uncabaret, an outstanding recurring alternative comedy show in which I was proud to be a regular participant for 25 or 30 years. The regular Uncabaret show still consists of an agressively adventurous form of stand up. But they also used to host an intermittent reading series featuring comedic written material. That is how and why this piece exists.

Biscuit from The Seige of Paris, 1870. On display in the Leland Stanford Museum.

CORRECTION, added AFTER PUBLISHING:

When we wrote this piece, 20 something years ago, neither one of us mentioned one important point of reference. And it was the fact that the problem was really that Andy was bring all his crazy ‘stuff’ into a medium sized house that was already filled to the brim with crazy stuff belonging to ME. I had been saving my own multiple collections of ceramic figurines from thrift stores and weird plastic souvenirs from travels and stopovers at airports since the late SIXTIES. I have always been a scrupulous anthropologist of pop culture crap. For example: THIS, which I purchased at the age of 18 at a Walgreen’s during a period where even PEZ was trying to market psychedelically! Come on! Mod Pez!! I always knew better than to throw this away!

So let us return now to an unspecified day, sometime around 2003, when Mr. Andy Prieboy and I wrote an essay together. We passed it back and forth, each writing our own words.

ON THROWING STUFF OUT.

By Merrill Markoe and Andy Prieboy

On the eve of the merger of two households into one, Merrill and Andy decide they better have a talk about how this is going to work.

MERRILL: Before you move in here there’s something I need to talk about. Yesterday I was looking at the dozens and dozens of boxes of stuff you are planning to bring over, and I was thinking…and please don’t take this the wrong way….that maybe you should consider throwing a few things away.

Allow me to clarify my terms.  By ‘a few things’ I mean…a lot of things. And by ‘a lot of things’ I mean ‘most of them.’

 It’s common knowledge that the three most traumatic events in a person’s life are death, divorce and moving. Oddly enough, all three things involve elimination of something extraneous . Death involves corpses, Divorce involves exes…and in your case moving involves endless boxes of inexplicable crap. 

Of course, I am not suggesting that you throw out the things that represent important moments. In fact I insist that you save your CD’s, your favorite books, your hard drives and cassettes full of songs, your Napoleonic collectibles, and the many whimsical photos of you on the road enjoying mad cap rock and roll shenanigans with your various bands.  Ditto for diaries, quality framed art and so forth. But it’s the… how do I say it… souvenirs of the smaller, less memorable moments… I might even call them ‘the completely pointless’ moments…of which I  am now speaking: I’m talking about the many manila envelopes stuffed full of not just letters from your old friends and old girlfriends, (God knows you can’t part with those)..but other people’s old friends and girlfriends as well.  Do you know you have unopened bills from the DWP and parking ticket reminders that are postmarked l992, some of which are not even addressed to you? And you have apparently saved every magazine you ever bought! Every issue of ‘Road and Track’! Every issue of ‘Military History’! Every issue of ‘Jugs!!” It’s bad enough that you went to the news stand in the eighties, presumably without wearing a disguise, and purchased a magazine called “Big Butt”, not just once but on many occasions. But how many boxes of big butts does any one person need? Especially since I have heard there are a wide assortment of brand new ones available on line. 

And I haven’t even mentioned all the theoretically amusing but now shredded and grease stained pieces of travel memorabilia. Like the old hotel room keys from Germany and the torn ‘Do Not Disturb’ signs from Denmark. These are the things that Mother Nature in her infinite wisdom has asked me to tell you she would like to use for land fill. 

 In other words, here’s what I am suggesting: Now’s the time for sorting through those hundreds of ironic newspaper clippings, and those intriguing but moth-eaten Carnaby street coats…(to say nothing of those patent leather platform shoe that you only have one of )…and finally having the courage to give them the old Heave Ho…before they occupy so much floor space in the place that I call home that the furniture, the people, and the animals presently in residence will have to all relocate to an apartment down town.

ANDY:

Merrill …Do you see this? Do you realize what this is? I know It looks like just another large pointed screw.  It’s an inch high, covered in oil and has a washer attached to the bottom.  This screw was jammed into my tire so effectively that it created not just a puncture but it’s own seal,… making it possible for me to drive from Malibu to Burbank on the 101 at seventy miles an hour without a single mishap. I drove forty miles with this thing in my tire. Forty miles, Merrill!! And you would have me throw it out?

 Greater men than I …  for example Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol… have held on to what more rational people might view as a lot of useless junk . Did you know that The Stanford University Museum devotes a respectable section of a custom built display case for a biscuit from the Siege of Paris? The Seige of Paris was in 1870! So we’re talking about a one hundred and thirty year old biscuit!

Think about it for a second: The Germanic Imperial forces had surrounded the city. Parisians, rich and poor alike, were so hungry they were reduced to eating cats, dogs and horses! Family pets, Merrill! Parisians reduced to eating family pets! And yet someone held on to this biscuit! The mind reels imagining why this biscuit was saved but never eaten. Was it accidentally rediscovered when someone reached in to his pocket, years later, looking for their keys and said ”Hey! I was looking for this! Here’s my biscuit!!” Or was it such a horrible recipe that even eating a cat seemed like a better idea? Or did the owner buy the biscuit on the day The Siege was lifted but held on to it anyway… just in case? Imagine how many times the original owners and the subsequent owners of this biscuit were admonished by others to “throw that damn biscuit away”, never stopping to think for even a moment that the biscuit might be museum quality!

 And that’s not the only example:   Consider the case of General Sickles.  Here’s a man who, during the Civil War , not only lost his leg at Gettysburg, he afterwards kept it, stripped it, shellacked it and had the bone mounted!  Obviously there’s no way that he or I can justify our actions logically . Were I as pragmatic as you, I would let go of yesterday and leap into tomorrow, unfettered, ready to greet one victory after the next. However, I am not. I am a man who is, perhaps unfortunately, ruled by his passions. I am led blindly by the Quixotic illusions that have filled my life with romantic disasters.

These irrelevant boxes of which you speak are, in essence, crypts and coffins: for friendships lost, love gone awry, and years of desperate gambles for success .

For instance I suppose you’re wondering about this partially melted audio cassette. It was obviously damaged by fire. This cassette contains the remains of a song I thought would launch my career.  Twenty years ago an irate, drunken, English girlfriend, in an irate drunken rage, threw it and fifty other similar cassettes on to all four burners of a lit gas stove, along with my guitar, my little casio, and an assortment of my notebooks. Which I believe are in one of these other boxes. And why did I save them? Because, Merrill… I pulled them all out of the fire with my bare hands.

What you see in front of you may LOOK like boxes full of yellowing scraps of paper. But do not be deceived. Look more closely.  Here we have a contract, which I signed in 1982. Unbeknownst to me, the producer I signed with, who promised to make me a star, was using my recording project as a money laundering scheme to hide his enormous heroin habit. But because I signed this contract, when I tried to leave, he later sued me and won.  Yet, for all the horror this contract represents, it’s the very thing that brought me here and eventually led me to this  moment.

 And you would have me throw all this away?

MERRILL:

In a word: YES!!!! Yes, I would! In a heartbeat! It wouldn’t even require a whole heartbeat.

What you have just described are unpleasant reminders of horrible moments. You don’t seem to understand that people keep souvenirs of good times….like the ashtray from that naughty night out in the Wisconsin Dells. Not the butt from the cigarette they put out on your forehead when you were kept in a bamboo cage in the Hanoi Hilton!

 I also would like to point out that Andy Warhol kept all his crap in a converted factory. Because Andy Warhol OWNED that factory. Picasso lived in a villa. And Leland Stanford sure as hell didn’t share the enormous mansion he called home with any indigestible fossilized biscuits.

By the way, I’m glad you brought up General Sickles, since I just googled him and found out that he didn’t have that that amputated leg of his mounted so he could hang it over the fireplace like a large mouth bass.  He donated it to the U.S. Army Museum.  Would that I might call them up and offer them all of your stuff. Unfortunately, you are neither a decorated war veteran nor is the U.S. Army known for its love of irony. I suspect they might not have a need for any more melted audio tapes. I guess there’s a slight chance that The Salvation Army Museum, if such a place exists, might come take a look at some of this stuff. But I have a sneaking suspicion that not even a nicely dressed up listing on e-bay would collect many bids for your nightmarish contracts and really old bills.

 Which brings me to the center of the point I am trying to make: Even assuming someone… in this case, me…had the storage space, why would you, or anyone for that matter,  voluntarily choose to live in a house full of crypts and coffins? (And I feel I should point out that when you say ‘crypts and coffins’ you are not talking about polished mahogany and carved marble. You are in fact referring to damp rotting boxes from Staples. Not to mention those plastic tubs from Sav-on full of not only an assortment of passionate letters from your ex-lovers that say things like “When I give you my body it’s a gift”… but their random shopping lists and their little ‘You were sleeping when I left. See ya later! Love ya. Byeee!!” notes as well.)  It’s bad enough to know that these letters are planning to take up my coveted closet space. But its worse to contemplate the fact that you once loved a woman who spells ‘Bye’ with three e’s and five exclamation points.

 In my opinion, a person needs to go through their belongings a couple times a year and throw out about a quarter of them, just to earn the right to ever get anything new. Because never throwing things out is like never taking a bath. It’s encouraging metaphysical grime, bacteria and fungal matter to clog up all the places in your mind where personal growth, spiritual renewal and interesting brand new dinner party anecdotes might gestate.

 I mean, look at it this way: If you never bring in anything new, then all this old stuff you are haul around defines you. You wind up with “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’s” disease; walking through life not only dragging around a dead albatross, but boring and puzzling everyone you encounter by asking them to stop and listen as you continue to whine about him. I don’t know if you are aware of this but the stink of a rotting bird can be kind of a turn off to a lot of people . Even though I am aware that nowadays an albatross is pretty hard to come by. So I suppose if I saw one dead somewhere, I might have an urge to take it home and try to preserve it somehow. But I probably wouldn’t store in a taped-up shoe-box under layers of old sunglasses, Cadillac brochures, and unreturned hotel room keys like you would.

What I am trying to say is that it’s a much better idea to resist saving everything you encounter. Because logic dictates that hoarding too many unnecessary possessions creates the metaphysical equivalent of a black hole in which you find yourself living, ruled by a gravitational pull so intense it will crush the start of your new life. And you don’t want that, do you?

ANDY:

Black holes!? Albatrosses!? Ancient Mariners? Oh God. Spare me.

So what ?? You’re  completely ignoring the creative potential that all this residue of mine provides.

The majority of my life has been a series of accidents. So while the content of these boxes may look like chaos to you, I actually went to the trouble of intentionally arranging each of these boxes just the way you now find them… using no plan whatsoever. That way each box becomes a collage of eras, epochs, and opi…  if that is indeed the plural of opus.

Thus, when I go through them, they allow me to reflect back on my life in the same haphazard fashion in which it all first occurred:  “What’s this? Ah! A letter from Max. What does old Max have to say? And, hello!… who is this lovely maiden? Why, it is The Hissing Woman of Amsterdam!! ‘Well, how do you do! What? You wish me to slap you but not kiss you? I ‘m very sorry, Hissing Woman, but I really must be going.”

Each encounter with a piece of decaying memorabilia kick-starts my memory. It allows me to see my past with fresh perspective! So what you refer to as ‘landfill’ is actually research material that seeds and fertilizes my creative process, hopefully resulting in deep psychological insight, (which you girls all claim to love) if not also arias or opera buffo.

MERRILL:

Well, we certainly agree on one thing: That all this so called ‘research material’ is going to produce opera buffo. Because that’s a good description of a life that is destined to be spent tripping over an obstacle course made of boxes full of…okay I’ll say it…shit.

And as for The Creative Content of which you speak…it is the stuff of which melodrama is made. Mother Nature, you may have noticed, prefers real drama. When a forest gets too thick, a fire springs up to thin things out. Mother Nature allows only just so much stuff to occupy any finite space at any one moment in time. And if that line is crossed, she sends in a Cleaning Crew.

Case in point: Where I live in Los Angeles, along with the standard two weather-based seasons of Southern California (Too Hot.and Pretty Nice(plus, of course, pilot season) there exists an annual terrifying additional season: fire season. On two occasions in recent years I have been asked to evacuate my house.

Suddenly, when facing a Sophie’s Choice about which possessions to save, due to the limited space in the trunk of my car, I learned that it becomes abundantly clear that only certain photo albums or diary pages are going to be permitted to make the trip to safety. So I must repeatedly answer a pressing question: What am I going to take with me? My hilarious snow globe collection? Or my dogs? My many hotel soaps and shower caps ? Or a few pairs of shoes?

 And after it is all over…once I am allowed to return to my home, it is hard not to see the things I was willing to let burn in a very different light.

 When push came to shove, most of the stuff I was saving didn’t really matter. So why in hell am I letting it take up so much of my space?

ANDY:

Let me answer your question with a question; What would humanity have lost if Good King Tutankhamen had thought like that? Archeologists would have searched for years, then rolled back the big stone, only to exclaim ‘Oh -look how nice and neat Tut left his tomb.”

Where are Yorrick’s infinite jests and most excellent fancy? Where are his jibes, his gambols, his songs, his flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table  a-roar?Well, probably in one of these boxes, along with two pages of a seven page letter he sent and a nude snapshot of the girl he met in Dusseldorf.

The Ancient Mariner will always carry the Albatross, whether the physical one rots away or not. Because no matter how much you try to prune your life, you’re still “The Albatross Guy” to the kids in the neighborhood. Besides, screw that Mariner’s complaining shipmates. What did they have to do that was so important they couldn’t listen to an old guy’s stories? Wait for the wind to pick up? Sing some more of those sea chanties?

And when the Malibu fires do come and sweep away our possessions, who do you think is going to get more airtime ? You, with your neatly filed folios, skipping out unburdened? Or me screaming “I lost everything!”

Yes. That’s right. I will get the air time. Because those three words are not just timeless, and universal but also the perfect sound bite for the six o’clock news.   Friendships fade, love dies, opportunities are only paper cups in the wind. Too late we realize that life is short and love is fragile. And in the end, nothing lasts in this world.

Nothing at all except stuff. Lovely , memory laden, tear stained, remorse filled residual stuff.

Yes, I know I can’t take it with me. That’s why I plan to shove it into a closet and let you deal with it after I’m gone. If a man can’t leave his mark, at least he can leave his crap.