Stuff and nonsense - Oh, what to move?

"Women tend to keep bathroom things and men tend to keep refrigerator things."

I'm in the process of moving so I've got stuff on the brain. I'm tossing out the stuff I don't need: nick-knacks, books I never read, pants I can't wear, photos of people I've forgotten and keys … jeez, I must have keys back to my roller skating days. If I knew which ones unlocked what, I'd throw most of them away.

There are two kinds of people: dumpers and savers. You can't tell them from how they talk; sometimes you can't even tell from visiting their homes. The acid test is their moving behavior. Dumpers get rid of stuff; they move lean and mean. Savers keep everything, like infomercial purchases that don't work and clothes that don't fit. Face it, Fred; you'll never use that Vegematic and you'll never see that 32" waist again either.

Savers have a relationship with their stuff. When they see bell-bottoms they remember the Afro-haired pimply-faced young man who bought them. A saver's past is embedded in his stuff; his closet is his history — a 3D diary of his life. Savers take their stuff with them on every move, stuff that hasn't been used since they wore short pants to church. Instead of buying new stuff for the new place, a saver would rather refinance the old stuff.

I'm a dumper, except for certain anatomical magazines for which I have a note from my doctor. I say, give the old stuff to Goodwill and let Uncle Sam pay his fair share. Savers are afraid they won't have something like a plumber's helper WHEN they need it. This mindset is left over from the pioneer days when, if you left your screwdriver in St. Louis, it took three months covered wagoning through twelve Indian tribes to retrieve it.

If two people are moving, there's her stuff, his stuff and joint stuff, which results in three possible scenarios:

--The Two Saver scenario always ends in needing to buy a bigger house. It's a myth that stuff is inanimate. Leave stuff alone in a dark room with soft lights and mood music and you'll soon have lots of little stuffings. Try it.

--The One Saver-One Dumper scenario is a Mexican standoff. While one is buying new stuff, the other is throwing out stuff they haven't used since the Korean War. The nature of the stuff in this relationship may change, but the absolute quantity of stuff remains a constant.

--The Double-Dumper scenario eventually ends with an empty house.

Actually, there's a fourth wild-card scenario where some people throw stuff out, just not theirs. This causes domestic disturbances because, to generalize, men and women save different stuff. I admit generalizing is poor journalistic technique. Fortunately, I'm a humorist, not a journalist, and I thrive on generalization along with pigeonholing, stereotyping and fracturing facts. Thus said, let me generalize further and say that women tend to keep bathroom things and men tend to keep refrigerator things.

The stuff women keep in bathrooms are in tubes, vials, bottles and jars. A woman's bathroom is the repository of every item that promises to firm, tone, enhance, remove, highlight or cover-up that she's bought since age three because a) they're expensive and b) you can't prove to her, without an electron microscope, there isn't anything left in the container.

A man keeps stuff in the refrigerator because a) everyone knows REAL food, like pizza, gets better with age and b) if it could be proven he drank the last drop of milk, he'd have to go to the store and buy another quart. He also knows this milk run command will not be issued until the Forty-niners enter sudden death overtime. Besides, food is organic and continues to grow even in cold temperatures. This is the American male's contribution to the diverse gene pool.

Self-storage companies are the ones who suck on the teat of stuffishness, getting rich on America's inability to let go. What we need are storage condos we can buy so we don't have to pay rent every month. Over time the condos will appreciate and soon be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you can mortgage your storage area and the long-term increase in value will be your retirement fund. Isn't that the California way?
(The second article in this series is entitled "Moving's for dummies.")
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