I hate new year’s eve.

We as creatures occupy space. We take up a certain amount of space. How much space do we inhabit? We inhabit, we exist, what are we doing at any given moment as we occupy space? How can we distinguish the event of being in any one place or another?

I have a garage. In that garage is some stuff. What is that stuff, and more importantly what is that stuff to me? Ownership is a tricky contract. I created a lot of it, or if we are to be more specific I reorganized some objects I purchased into more specific composed combinations of objects. I made some art. My garage is full of boxes of trinkets I value and sculptures I built. Two friends are storing their stuff as well. Stuff they don’t need while they live on a boat. I have a half dozen bikes, I can call them mine as I maintain them and I believe maintenance grants a distinct amount of ownership. But it’s really all just stuff. Stuff I couldn’t really list in any accurate document. And as I write this, the boat people appeared and are going to look through their stuff for something they need for the new year.

I hate New Year’s Eve as an event. Which of course makes me old, but I do, I guess I always have. I have had my fair share of decent nights on December 31, any-year-here. Mostly spent at the Red Fox bar in Portland Oregon, but this year I couldn’t stand the idea of the cold. Though I will miss the fish toss for the first time in a while.
But all this damn stuff. I have a studio on campus, I have a studio off campus in Goleta near the airport. I have a garage and an apartment, they are all full of stuff. I moved here with a small trailer and a pick-up bed full of stuff. Not even a long bed, a six foot four inch blue box of stuff. In three years I have built up a stupid amount of stuff. Now I feel like I am wearing a psychic velcro suit and all this stuff is stuck to every angle of my imagination weighting it down. Now that said I have a very decent egg pan and a very decent coffee cup and a nice kettle and French press. So if I have those things and can tolerate their continued presence in my life than surely I can tolerate that box of useless trinkets from ten years ago in the garage.

Space is a funny strange and bizarre way to define and comprehend territory. As animals we have our territories, in our primal sense we have our sleeping places and our bathing places and our eating grounds and I guess we also identify hunting grounds. But to really feel an ownership over a space seems slightly or greatly absurd. We rent this five hundred square feet of building which we call out apartment. But its not ours, its not even theirs. It’s just a space I have a key to. But I watched a guy named Bobby from Santa Barbara Locksmith open my front door for me in a couple seconds. Despite the fact that I asked him to do it, the act set me on edge a bit as I had known it was easy to pick locks but really, seconds.

So here I have this space, that’s not mine, and a bunch of stuff that I can’t really remember or see in my head and all this stuff that feels… well it just feels like a lot of responsibility, like I keep imagining having to put it all in boxes. Strange to look in a closet for a band-aide and think how everything in the closet is just debris. All this stuff that I don’t use the way I use my coffee cup. We bought a bunch of food the other day and carried it all up our front stairs and Sam packed it into the cupboards and fridge, two more closets really. And as we did this I thought we will have to carry all of this back out of here. All the packaging, all the bulk of the food will have to leave the apartment in one form or another. So what is all this stuff cluttering up my mind? Every year I come to this night, which of course is just a random day in the revolution of the planet. Ask Samoa they skipped Friday this year in order to get into a new time zone. They just skipped a day, so I know this day is really just all of us agreeing to imagine it as something important, well my imagination is occupied right now and I can’t imagine this being a night I care about. But everyone else does so I have to go out with them or curmudge on my own, its up to me. The boat people have gone off to buy tickets for a dance party that they will try to force me to go to, and I probably will, because the one thing I know about dancing is; it generates exactly zero stuff and I can do it in any space regardless if I own the space or not.

Hey New Year’s Eve… pound sand!!!!