Partner has been watching “Hoarders” a lot lately, and it is having a very salutary effect on him; he's been cleaning and throwing things away like mad. Believe me, I'm not pointing fingers. About a year and a half ago I watched a couple of episodes of “Clean House,” which is basically a more low-key version of the same thing (the people are just as crazy, but they don't seem quite as maniacal as the people on “Hoarders”; also Niecy Nash is very funny, and I found Matt Iseman very restful to look at), and it inspired me to clean out the entire basement storage space.
But I have also become uneasily aware that I need to do something about the huge stack of VHS tapes sitting next to the television cabinet.
I never watch them. But never. I put away a big box of really unwatched tapes in the basement last year, and I have resolved to give most or all of those to Partner's mother's nursing home very soon. The tapes that I keep in the living room are (ostensibly) favorites, things I really don't want to get rid of - but they're really just taking up space.
So what's my resistance all about? Well, I do tend to accumulate things in a “Hoarders”-like way, though maybe not to the point of pathology. And I spent $$$ on all those tapes, and if I actually counted up all the cash I spent on videos, I would probably burst into tears; getting rid of them is an admission that I wasted my money, a little at a time, over a whole bunch of years. And there are a few tapes that I will certainly keep no matter what (nothing but Grim Death will part me from my copy of John Waters's “Desperate Living”).
There was a halcyon period in the early 1990s when everything - everything - was suddenly appearing on VHS: old movies, new movies, old TV shows, cartoons. It was wonderful to own them, and the prices seemed moderate. The flaw in this reasoning became apparent to me very early on, when I joined a mail-order video club in the late 1980s and tried to pick out my introductory stack of six videos.
Naturally I included “The Sound of Music.” Who wouldn't want to own that?
And I literally never watched it.
How often do you come home from work and say, "I really feel like watching 'The Sound of Music' right now"?
Netflix, and streaming video, have freed me. So long as I'm reasonably certain that I can find (let's say) “The Sound of Music” somewhere out there in the cloudy firmament, my pathological need to own it is considerably diminished.
Now I just need to overcome my hoarding instinct, and get a box, and start pitching tapes into it.
And then I can start thinking about that little cupboard full of unwatched DVDs.
No comments:
Post a Comment