HUNTING AND GATHERING

While mankind has progressed quite a bit since our early days of being scrawny, cave-dwelling scavengers who hunted and gathered for a living while trying to dodge gigantic predators who had a hankering to hunt and gather us, we're not completely out of the woods yet, literally. What is work but hunting every day for a means to get by? Shopping? Bingo, that's gathering. And anyone who has a garage or basement in their home usually fills it with gathered stuff, most of which we really don't need, otherwise these prizes wouldn't be collecting dust in our garages, attics and basements. Our modern day caves are often filled to overflowing with the stuff we gather.

Here's a clue; if you own something and haven't used it or even seen it for two years, you do not need it. When you have enough useless junk stored up, you need to hold a Garage Sale, the better to make room for more stuff you want to gather, perhaps acquiring some of it from someone else's Garage Sale. It's a pretty loose but vaguely efficient system for all the people who have basements, sheds, attics and garages, a sharing of the gathering and storing duties. Those of us who live in apartments with limited storage space cannot gather as much stuff, but we've become ingenious with shelving and rack systems to maximize our gathering capacity.

Which is why when somebody moves to a new home, even from the tiniest studio apartment, we discard at least 40% of what we own. This was as true when we lived in caves and it is today. The longer you live in one place, the more useless crap you store. Some of us are more gatherer-oriented than others, filling every spare square inch with items of questionable utility. Their basements, garages, attics and sheds are bursting with "good stuff it would be a shame to get rid of" and their living quarters are characterized by narrow pathways to do whatever moving around is required to live one's life. The rest of the place is filled with stuff.

Those are the people who never hold a garage sale but attend every one they hear about, paying bargain prices for the privilege of storing someone else's junk. These people fancy themselves Collectors, while others less charitably refer to them as Pack Rats. And in truth, some of these collectors do store some really cool stuff, whether or not they ever use it or even remember they own it. Most of it, however, is simply junk, and junk that is stored in precarious piles that only the owner of such a home can negotiate without causing an avalanche and risking serious injury.

Those antique milk cans, broken phonographs, stacks of old magazines and records that can only be played on working phonographs, all that useful-looking lumber and plumbing pipes that will never be a part of anything, clothing no one has worn in decades, aging toys, tools and bicycles are stored in no particular order since no one will ever be looking for any of it. It's just there, just in case. Just in case of what? Who knows? It's not exactly like there's a reasonable explanation for all our actions. Probably the only reason this stuff is there is because we're humans and we have a tendency to hunt and gather as much stuff as we can in case of a severe winter or a drought or a sudden infestation of large predators. That just in case.

Even though we don't live that sort of life anymore, we can't help ourselves, it's in our DNA. For the vast majority of human history, the part before we started writing it all down, we were not the top of the food chain, and it took us hundreds of thousands of years to eliminate the competition. Anybody seen any Saber Tooth Tigers, giant Short Faced Bears or Caribou the size of a small bulldozer lately? Or for that matter, any Neanderthal men? We coexisted with those people for millennia until we decided that they would be better off dead, and that was that. We got their hunting grounds and their caves and whatever cool stuff they had stored in them.

This time of year especially, get ready to store a whole lot more useless stuff, like that reindeer hat with the antlers and matching sweater, the bottle of Brut, that contraption that makes juice that is not as good as the ready-made juices available anywhere and wrecks your kitchen, another framed photograph of relatives you don't care for all that much (it has a nice frame, after all), the hand-knitted little sweater things that keep your spare rolls of toilet paper warm, the bobble-head dolls of an athlete your team has traded away and the electric socks that make you feel like you're being electrocuted when your feet start sweating.

It would be a shame to throw all this good stuff out, right? It's just a question of where do we put it all. The garage, attic and basement are full, so maybe we can just order another shed from Sears to match the other two in the backyard, the one that holds the stuff we actually use from time to time, and the other one that holds... stuff. We're hunters and gatherers at heart, people, so what the hell! When shed #3 gets full, we can always hold a Garage Sale. But can we really part with those chipped bowling trophies with a stranger's name on them, the oblong baseballs held together with electrical tape, rusty basketball hoops, roller skates that don't roll anymore and that collection of ugly clocks that stopped a long time ago? And those 2 by 4's will straighten right out again with enough of those big old rusty nails we've been saving. You just never know when these things will come in handy, or if Saber Toothed Tigers make a comeback, we can build barricades with our stuff. You know, just in case...