Do you remember Fish Griwkowsky’s Minimalism Game from December, where Fish got rid of hundreds of items cluttering up his apartment?
The project was one of the winners of the 2016 Society for Features Journalism awars, in the project category.
Here’s the project, from start to finish, again:
Watching Minsk glow in flames behind her as she and her sisters fled the fallen city through the mud, my grandmother would later in life become a notorious pack rat. To the ravenous war, after all, she had lost nearly everything — including members of her family.
Growing up in her wonderful, ancient and often-frozen two-storey house, I was an unconcerned child running through a cobbled-together classical museum of her precious, if inexpensive objects. Even in old photos it’s a hallucinatory playground: gorgeous, shimmering drapes; loads of bookshelves; and a gallery’s worth of framed original art by an Orthodox icon painter whose works had outlived him.
There seemed to be informal collections everywhere — of art, encyclopedias and even mutant potatoes in the open-earth root cellar downstairs, their wormy eyes stretching out like feelers in the dark where the mice wandered freely. To me, everything was just so fascinating.
In some ways, I never had a chance — materialism had got into me almost genetically, and civilizational peer pressure didn’t help. The naming of, playing with and collecting of objects — of things fine, wretched, dirty or glorious, but above all interesting — has permeated my life since. Maybe you know the feeling.
But, really, all this is just a big fat excuse for overloaded shelves, seam-ripped boxes of old papers and various storage spaces crammed to suffocation.
If I’m going to be honest — as this story’s villain, I’m collecting even my grandmother’s tragedy as a trinket — I’ll admit publicly, right here, that I’ve got a serious First World problem.
Just ask my space-sucking high school binders, endless stacks of promo CDs and perhaps embarrassing collection of Garfield erasers. Just another pack rat in our decadent, materialistic civilization, I’m addicted to junk.
So just in time for Christmas, I decided, well, why not do something about it?
For months I’ve been eyeing Marie Kondo’s tiny blue book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up — reluctant to buy it for two major reasons. First, it would be the first official self-help book I’ve ever bought — so, you know: lame. And second, the built-in irony of buying a thing to get rid of things kept glutching in a little flow chart sparking and coughing in my head.
But the book turned out to have some good advice. For example, when embarking on a cleansing program, get rid of old clothes first as they tend to deteriorate, and leave sentimental items for last, once you’ve become an expert in heartless disposal.
Kondo’s overriding qualification for keeping something: “Does it spark joy?”
The KonMari Method, as she calls it, also includes a weird ritual of thanking each object for its service before you get rid of it. Though it’s completely bat—-, I like this a lot.
Still, once she got talking about getting rid of books — books! — she lost me.
Then I remembered a plan I once had for ramping up into a sit-up routine (instead I did none), and so looked around to see if getting rid of things had a similar recipe — one that I would actually follow this time.
At theminimalists.com, The Minimalism Game was this, perfectly.
Here’s how it goes: On the first day of the month — in this case December — get rid of one thing. On the second, two. Keep repeating this process until the end of the month. December has 31 days, so using the Gauss formula (from those high school math texts I kept, so there), S = n (n + 1)/2 — that’s 496 items!
That may not adhere to the KonMari Method, but it’s a healthy start.
And so, for the month of December, while everyone else is out buying a bunch of future radioactive ashes and/or flea market garbage for their loved ones, I’ll be attempting the opposite.
Every day, including Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I’ll send out an update on what’s been released, where some of it’s going — from charities to friends to Dumpster — and how hard everything was to peel out of these cold, dead hands.
If you like, please join in on this quest to reduce, and by all means let us know how it’s going by cluttering up social media with the hashtag #yegminimal.
OK, here we go!
Hmmm. But hold on, now … This elastic-band ball seriously contains a number of important memories …
Day 1, item 1 in the month-long Minimalism Game — a decaying ball of elastic bands begun in the ’90s!
The Minimalism Game — Day 1
OK, here we go, the chute’s open and the bronco of ritual reduction is bucking! Who — but maybe I should get rid of that awkward metaphor first.
Instead, this: as today is the easiest day, with only one thing to eliminate forever, let’s dispose of a decaying ball of elastic bands I’ve been holding onto and growing like a tiny veined baby for about 15 years.
Fraying and mysteriously crusty, this now-bounceless spheroid symbolizes a time when hopeful record labels used to send along about 20 CDs a week, way more around Christmas as all the country artists hoped to cash in for the holidays.
Looking now like a mummified jellyfish, the rubbery ball is shedding its wiggly skin in little strips all over the living room like the toenails of a resented roommate.
I also like this one because it’s technically hundreds of things — individual rubber bands — counted as one. Less is more!
Thank you for your service, decaying elastic band ball, and good riddance.
Only 495 things to go …
The Complete National Geographic on CD-ROM and a dead Nintendo, the latest victims of the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 2
Two boxes of lies! One promised knowledge, the other relaxation. Yet both were dismal personal failures.
On the knowledge side, the 111 years of National Geographic available at the turn of the century certainly helped our civilization in real and alluring ways as a publication. But all I ever looked up on this 31-disc box set with its abysmal computer interface were warplanes, naked people and, pathetically, Edmonton.
As far as relaxation goes, the Nintendo is a longer, unhealthier story, one involving Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of … Tetris? Seriously, I could have picked any skill to conquer: accordion, ski jumping, home surgery, even being nice to people — and I picked Tetris!?
In my prime I’d never been beat at Russia’s greatest game machine. I can still close my ears and hear that song. But when I plugged in the old box recently, Alexey Pajitnov’s seven falling tetrominoes mostly just stressed me out as a complete, ultimately frustrating time-waster — a dark metaphor for life itself where one can never win against the ruthless, unending onslaught. My mind constantly drifted to problems. Then, one Sunday afternoon, the first console I ever bought with my own money simply, irreparably croaked. It was a relief.
But thank you for your service, boxes — I know you tried.
Day 3 of the Minimalism Game is about letting go of the departed … in this case a radiotherapy mould, a Metallica T-shirt and a Wayne Gretzky mirror clock.
The Minimalism Game — Day 3
Today is all about letting go of the dead and departed.
Let’s start with the complicated case of Wayne Gretzky, here represented by this mirror clock from his Edmonton heyday. A glowing childhood hero to — well — you, me and everyone we know. But Gretz’s association with and endorsement of known vampires lately has left me cold. What he did for hockey and this city isn’t gone, but he’s really got no place for me in the present, sorry. Also, why is there a 99 on the front of his jersey? And honestly, this clock is broken garbage that looks like it flew out of a filth-encrusted boogie van driven by pornographers fleeing the RCMP 30 years ago.
As far as the Metallica T-shirt goes, in the bowels of the Coliseum I once chatted one-on-one with singer James Hetfield about Cthulhu monsters and what the hell happened to his band. So this relatively meaningless, way-later reproduction of Kill ‘Em All march with a large hole in the armpit is going to a better place. Hit the lights!
Now the hard part. A friend of mine died of cancer a few years ago and before he was gone, Darren bequeathed his radiotherapy mould my way. At the time, we laughed about what a grim trophy this would be, but at least I’d still have some sense of his physicality. What’s more important, of course, is that I still love him, and will as long as I’m around — true of so many in his circle of family and friends. I suspect you have someone like that.
Marie Kondo’s book on decluttering asks us to pick up each of our things to see if they spark joy. This last object makes me terribly sad, so it’s easy to let go — because what’s important honestly can’t be given away.
Day 4 of the Minimalism Game is all about bearing soles, or the removal of footwear.
The Minimalism Game — Day 4
Today’s post is all about bearing soles, or, to put it another equally painful way, removing your footwear.
Sexism tells us obsessive hoarding of shoes belongs to only half the human race, but you don’t give credence to every lame stereotype, do you? Speaking of junk, isn’t it funny how shoes work a little like scent — perhaps because of scent, actually — but they do bring you right back to a specific time and place.
These snowshoes have actually crossed the North Saskatchewan ice from the north shore to the south, my companion Bert Gretzky helping the whole way by repeatedly yelling that I was about to die. He was right, at least about it being a bad idea — but life is full of urges where we do dumb things for the sake of a story about, uh, footwear down the road.
I’ve also been dragging around the left half of my first pair of Reebok high-tops from high school, complete with Cookie Monster and Big Bird figurines tied to the laces. I should have been chased out of the schoolyard by pitchfork-wielding jocks way more than I was.
These five booze tools are the latest to go in the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 5
How’s this for an opener — make that five of them, actually.
As much as the decluttering agenda of the Minimalism Game can make a person honestly thankful for their hard-earned pirate booty, it also turns one a little mean. Always a good idea around utensil drawers full of knives.
Given that we only need one, I’m curious to know if any of you out there have such accidental collections of bottle openers. It seems like just the sort of thing that might be common at anyone’s parties over the years: BYOBO — bring your own bottle opener. Then, by all means, leave it on the kitchen floor beside your earrings and hilariously abandoned dignity.
Not that I’m sneering at libation — I love booze in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of way. But I’m also not surprised that, for the most part, I’ve got absolutely no memory of where these various swings at designing the perfect decapper came from.
It’s hard to imagine that at least several acts of petty theft weren’t involved — which is appropriate enough as drinking is all about stealing: The confidence to say and do things one wouldn’t otherwise; the ability to forget, as so many songs go; and of course, the years off our lives when alcohol goes too far.
Well, that’s depressing. See you at the pub?
Day 6 of the Minimalism Game declutters while clearing the air.
The Minimalism Game — Day 6
Scented or unscented? Option B, please.
You know those superhero scenarios where someone suddenly gets the ability to read everyone’s mind and they clutch their head, screaming down to the concrete?
That’s how I am with the sense of smell. Ask my wife. I can tell if a cat has done its dark business minutes before any normal person, and have repeatedly proven I can sniff the difference between a glass of water poured in a bathroom or a kitchen — the latter always rustier, with a hint of onions. And when smoking was banned in bars? What an olfactory nightmare of blues farts and cider burbs. No wonder barflies are stereotypically addicted to cigarettes — it’s a nasal force field!
All of which is to say I’m not big on cologne, yet have been lame enough to move those super-sexy Lacoste dispensers through at least four abandoned homes. The combined smell of these various patchouli bathtub oils and Vera Wangs is a good case against the latter 20th century.
So, friends, don’t you think (yep, I’m really going to do this) it’s time I finally scent them on their way?
Day 7 of the Minimalism Game gets rid of redundant and never-read art books.
The Minimalism Game — Day 7
OK, now things are getting serious — art books?
In Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, her ruthlessness toward bound knowledge (ironic from a book) felt like sucking clean a pug’s toes after a shuffle through the dog park. “You cannot just get rid of books,” I growled to my imaginary toed pug. “It’s bloody sacrilege.”
It was on this controversial axis I spun toward the terrifying Minimalism Game in the first place.
But one of my best friends once said, “People who never change are boring.” Well, she also swore in there, so feel free to fill in the blanks a little — the more interactive this thing is the better. For example, have you been purging? It’d still be easy to catch up … 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
Point is, after a quick scan it was obvious some decluttering was possible in our apartment named Skybrary. That exhaustive Skokstad Art History behemoth, for example — we also had the fourth edition, and the After Modern Art 1945-2000? Redundant! As a side note, if you ever see any books by that publisher, grab them. Uh, see how hard it is to let go?
Anyway, the others are all represented in one way or another. For example, on this new thing called the Internet.
Kondo talked about how items and shelves will appreciate being freed up — and she was right. Books stacked on books are an act of suffocation, but you only really notice it once the air starts flowing again.
Say goodbye to dried-up hotel bathroom supplies.
The Minimalism Game — Day 8
Hotel body lotion — the lonely traveller’s best friend! How could any sane person possibly resist stealing these treasures and taking them home after every trip to dry up in the bottom of a plastic bin?
OK, admittedly, the shampoos from such exotic locales as Calgary and Red Deer actually got used up. But come on, hoarding these is an unquestionably bad habit, like licking sleeping strangers on the bus to Southgate.
That shaving cream in the photo may have actually come from a trip to Paris — in 1995. Might explain why it’s a solid powder. And besides, it’s an established fact that real men use their teeth to trim their facial hair.
And what the hell is beard lube? I mean, I could look it up — Google’s right there — but some things just aren’t worth investigating. Besides, staying completely in the dark about important issues is what Alberta’s all about — unless you’re some kind of Communist hippy!
Incidentally, tripadvisor.ca notes that hauling all your useless trinkets to Cuba — including supplies like these — is not quite the beneficial gesture you might think it is, just because a maid smiled at you. Read more about that here.
In the meantime, goodbye and fare thee well, hotel-bathroom cosmetics. May your sacrifice be felt by the billions of others of your kind suffocating the planet in tiny packages.
Discarded photo books on Day 9 of the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 9
Perhaps to look clever or viable, most of us hold books on the shelf, which we hope will eventually trickle something into our lives — maybe that magic day the myth of spare time finally comes a-knockin’.
Bound photo collections are a different sort of osmosis-by-consumption than books of words, though. When you look at a picture, it’s quite different than decoding the complicated pictograms we call letters. With photography, you’re invited to take your time, back up, close in. There’s nothing predictable about how long it might take you to get through a collection of images.
Better? Worse? Who cares — but the cliché about a picture being worth a thousand words certainly can be true. Sometimes with a photo, though, once is more than enough.
For most of the 20 years I’ve spent hauling around and being otherwise peripherally conscious of that fairly bulky Bryan Adams photo book, I was convinced it was a survey of images shot by him. Had I actually opened it, I would have seen that it’s just page after page of pictures of Adams by Andrew Catlin, whose name doesn’t appear once on the book’s cover. So this was a pretty easy discard.
The other books range in topic from skateboard culture to baby animals to celebrating frizzy-haired bikini models in a tabloid newspaper. That last book is somehow just creepy — I’m afraid to open it in case it’s a gateway to some kind of Matrix Narnia full of centaurs and unicorns in rubber bondage gear.
P.S. As this was about photo books, I went for a moody black-and-white shot in an alley. Did it make you have feelings?
Day 10 of the Minimalism Game: bricks and bones, with only a few muscles pulled walking them down Jasper Avenue over to the photo studio
The Minimalism Game — Day 10
Bricks and bones may break my back, but this haul couldn’t kill me.
Still: While the Minimalism Game is cutting into my old-man exercise walks, today made up for it all, dragging these heavy mothers down Jasper Avenue over to the photo studio. Bricks weigh a little over four pounds each — not so bad until you multiply that times seven, add all the camera equipment, then drag that to work and up and down a few flights. The weight of this project is getting harder to ignore.
Dem bones were thrown in mostly for the bad bricks/bones pun, part of some poor dead mammal’s spine segments in the woods I couldn’t resist possessing. These go back to nature.
Continuing with the macabre, terrifying illustrator and novelist Wayne Douglas Barlowe has an incredible book called Inferno in which the conceit is that he’s been selected as the artist-in-residence of hell. Down in the demon-infested darkness, his paintings detail walls and roads built with billions of bricks — each of them a still-conscious, compressed human. Let that be a lesson for coveting!
These bricks, with somewhat reduced suffering, tell all sorts of stories — one of them I actually brought back from Mexico, like a total idiot.
The Edmonton bricks I can already sense you salivating over come from the still-gaping Arlington ruin, originally spilling onto the street by the thousands.
They’re the perfect token for a city obsessed with its own airport code — I’m sure you remember a couple years ago #yeg was trending no less than globally on social media as the marketers had once again scored in the City of Consumer Champions.
Nonetheless, these #yegbricks have to go, in the quest to mortar together greater peace of mind with a less stressed spine of my own.
Ten knives and Lizardman is both a terrible band name and a great thing to get rid of in the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 11
Ten Knives and a Lizardman somehow sounds like a Gordon Lightfoot song to me …
♫ Ten knives and a lizardman came strollin’ down Portage and Main
♫ Ten knives and a lizardman, comin’ home to you agaaaain …
OK, maybe not — but here we are again at a point where a type of thing seems to be a magnet for its mysteriously growing numbers. Other examples: paper clips; back hair; Facebook friends you don’t know at all; more back hair.
But open your cutlery drawer and have a gander, I’ll wait. Ready? I bet you a Chewbacca howl you’re looking at a bunch of mismatched spoons, forks and knives — probably stolen from your parents’ place back when you first moved out. Is this really how you want to be remembered, howling like a Wookie in your underwear holding soup spoons?
Of course, despite the assurances from Knife Depot online that “there is nothing remotely scientific about the myth that giving a knife to someone as a present is bad luck,” they’re totally ignoring the fact that all superstitions are completely true. So just make sure to a give a penny along with each knife you pass along to a random stranger as you leap out at them from a dark alley.
The Lizardman, meanwhile, reminds us to be kind to others around Christmas. Otherwise they’ll get sad and drunk and in a fit of passion spend the weekend developing a Reptile Potion, which, like Spider-Man in that super-tight front-bump costume, is maybe not something you want hanging over your head.
Sitting on 11 Grumbacher art canvas boards, a replica model frigate is one of the bigger things to go in the Minimalism Game.
Minimalism Game — Day 12
Walk down Jasper Avenue with a huge model frigate and all of a sudden you’re everyone’s best friend, a painful reminder of the young and handsome days and just maybe a more generally friendly time.
I heard everything from “You don’t see that every day!” to, rather hilariously, “BOAT!” proving once again that any criticism of our western Canadian education system is unfounded. Knowledge of our basic objects? Check!
I inherited this big model — and another — from the collection of my friend’s father who died a while back, a real Den for Men-style classic that for some reason reminds me that some of the best sushi I ever had was in downtown Winnipeg.
Looking down at our broken chalk river under the tacky lights, it’s hard not to feel a little landlocked in Edmonton some nights. And I’ve wondered lately if I would have collected all this junk in a more coastal habitat, where mildew and insects would have destroyed everything, where it’s possible to kayak all year round without swallowing chlorine.
Thing is, this sleek ship is gorgeous, magnificent and certainly sparks joy. It’s the thing I’ve least wanted to part with so far in the Minimalism Game, and certainly gets my thanks. But like I said, already got another. And if you ever want to not have a collection of something useless, just get rid of the second one. Pretty good relationship advice as well.
The Grumbacher canvas boards upon which the frigate posed come from my grandmother’s art-supply hoard. But I made sure to hold onto a few I’ll probably never, ever paint a thing on, just to be secure.
The Minimalism Game, Day 13: saying goodbye to 13 McDonald’s toys.
The Minimalism Game — Day 13
There’s nothing anyone can do about it, but don’t you find it a little creepy that Disney controls such a big slice of the global pop culture pie now? The company’s non-stop presence in our daily peripheral vision is greater even than Tim Hortons street litter, and that’s saying something.
Everyone from Chewbacca to Kermit the Frog to Jessica Jones to Bugs Bunny to J. Jonah Jameson now answers to the mouse. And while their songs and stories are myriad and diverse, every single one of them is ultimately telling us the same thing: Buy me. Think of all that money going straight up every day, and meanwhile, I don’t know, 780 million people don’t have access to clean drinking water.
OK, I look enough like Karl Marx to leave that thread alone for now, but one thing that happens when you play the Minimalism Game is a gigantic reassessment of value. Namely, is the price of this object worth the space it now occupies like a stubborn anarchist on your way to the living room?
At 91 objects never to exist in my living space again, the sense of relief is growing, rather than a predicted tension as more and more of my days are dedicated to hauling this junk away.
Also, did you know there is a Fraggle named Boober? And that I can say in an actual sentence. Today I gave away two Boobers!
Fourteen LPs are going as part of the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 14
Just off Heddon Street near Piccadilly Circus in 1972 London, David Bowie posed for Brian Ward’s black-and-white photo that would soon adorn one of the most dark and magnificent rock ‘n’ roll albums of all time.
Now sanitized with a plaque stating the location’s historical relevance, I visited the spot a couple of years back. All the grit and magic and sexuality of that original moment is entirely absent. It’s basically a bus stop now, an echo chamber where you can’t hear the original sound.
You can’t hold onto everything.
This copy of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is the one I played as a scrawny lad onward. That hand-coloured album art is truly gorgeous except for a big Best Buy Series logo on the front. I’ve since found a copy without that graphic intrusion and, really, after bashing up against all this stuff for two weeks, it’s pretty easy to not give a rip about a particular album that has sold millions being “mine.” Besides, I actually met the guy, and you can’t top that with a thing.
The other LPs on this pile range from being doubles to being terrible, like that limp Johnny Cash Out Among the Stars or the Doctor Zhivago soundtrack. Elvis Costello’s entire shtick has always tasted like an onion sundae to me, and I’ll just be quiet about the CanCon rejects, lest questions of fealty arise. Though feel free to use CanCon Rejects for the name of your teenage punk band.
Thank you for your service, 14 LPs — but off to a better place! Costello’s already taken.
Asimov’s Robots / Galactic Empire / Foundation suite.
The Minimalism Game — Day 15
Fifteen books long, the best science fiction series I’ve ever read is Isaac Asimov’s Robots/Galactic Empire/Foundation suite, winner of countless awards confirming the love.
Written non-sequentially, Asimov’s impossible trick was to fuse his three separate storylines of human galactic history written over almost 45 years into one coherent arc.
Spanning some 25,000 years in space, you think you’d have trouble staying glued to a massively rotating cast, generations dying before your eyes. But a few names stick out — a cop named Elijah Bailey; the robots R. Daneel Olivaw and R. Giskard Reventlov; the nearly immortal Gladia; Hari Seldon, the most important mathematician in galactic history; and a tragic telepath known as the Mule.
Starting on modern-day Earth, by sequence’s end our planet is nothing but a radioactive myth few have ever heard of. Its main themes include robotics, telepathy and psychohistory — the precise mathematical predictability of large-scale human behaviour, mistakenly seen as the ultimate weapon. There are, for the most part, no alien races — and few space battles. Star Trek’s Data compared to Asimov’s robots seems like an echo written by stunted children.
Here’s one of the saga’s great scenes, between two robots: “Daneel, hesitantly and slowly, put out his hand and Giskard looked at it uncertainly. Then, very slowly, he put out his own hand. The fingertips almost touched and then, little by little, each took the other’s hand and clasped it — almost as though they were the friends they called each other.”
HBO is currently developing Foundation as a series — good luck. But do yourself a favour and read these. Obsessively, I’ve been collecting multiple copies of these books, and am passing them along as an off-date Christmas present to my friend Norm.
Sixteen 16 cameras and photo equipment go on Day 16 of the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 16
Today’s my mom’s 65th birthday and I thought about being a great son and picking out 16 beautiful objects for her from the clutter dump I crawl around in like a chubby cockroach. But then a dark(er) thought struck.
In Marie Kondo’s decluttering book, she says the last thing we should do is let our family — especially parents — get involved in our personal purging process. First of all, for reasons sentimental and otherwise, they’ll want things. This I’ve already encountered numerous times on this quest.
But here’s the grim part: if you give them your castoffs, someone will have to get rid of this stuff again. Probably you. Which means you haven’t really got rid of a thing at all. Which means you lost the Minimalism Game, via cheating.
Instead, let’s blow out 16 cameras and assorted photo equipment. Let’s call this Camera Purge, Part I.
Talking about surreal America being a place of elevated found objects in her book On Photography, Susan Sontag notes, “Our junk has become art. Our junk has become history.”
But some of it’s just junk. Most of the lenses and cameras here are broken, and there’s never been a better time to draw a line on the beachhead. I’m never, ever going to fix these things.
Unless the person you’re guilting into minimizing has an active workshop, one where they’re constantly bringing dead stuff back to life, chances are they won’t be fixing anything, either. But please don’t forget to sort out your junk before you get on someone else’s case.
Meanwhile, all I can offer my poor mother today is useless, invisible love. OK, fine, mom: you can have that stupid ukulele, too.
Today’s Minimalism Game gives away 17 items (or sets of things) running on a Star Wars theme.
The Minimalism Game — Day 17
Collection or addiction?
No one who knew me back in the Dark Times would hesitate for a second to say I had a psychological problem linked to Star Wars, the saga which continues its choke hold on the planet with Episode VII coming out today.
With an obsession more machine than man, instead of seeking the wonders of the world and art that define our civilization, I’d scour flea markets and junksellers across the planet, lugging a giant spaceship toy from Nashville, dragging tacky Year 2000 action figures home from Hong Kong, abandoning conversations with my girlfriend whenever some new Darth Vader standee showed up in a mall, literally begging — begging! — record store managers to put my name on the cardboard “treasure.”
It’s humiliating to think about now, actually painful. But as the planes hit the World Trade Center, first thing I thought of is how I skipped an earlier trip to New York to buy a chunk of moulded plastic made for a tiny pretend spaceman to fly around the living room. The toy ship sat in a meticulous array on shelves in a 360-degree display around my entire bedroom — a force field burning against existential angst.
Fact is, it was easy to scrape this tiny fraction off “the collection.” But digging through all my Star Wars stuff, I couldn’t find its core: the action figures it all started with. Lost? Stolen at some party? Hucked off the High Level during an alcoholic blackout?
The weird thing is I’m not that worried about it. They’ll either turn up or they won’t. I’m actually over it.
Ditching this cluster of cheap Pez dispensers, bad novels, games never played and — seriously? — an insultingly red Han Solo gun is pure relief.
We’re getting rid of 18 tools today in the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 18
Whoa, this was a rough one. Dry mouth, anxiety, regret! This game is starting to take its toll.
Does the fear have something to do with letting go of potential manhood? Nah, I could give a rip about that. You want screaming bros on motorbikes? Go watch the new Star Trek trailer.
Getting rid of these 18 tools was more a matter of being suffocated by premonitions of future emergencies.
In a terrorist-created earthquake, as one rational example, would I need this air-driven stapler, never mind that I’ve never owned an air compressor? Probably, but someone else will have to be the Hero in that dark hour. Most likely it’ll be my wife, who as I mentioned is better at most things than me — including the use of tools. It’s actually for her I was stressing out, as she’s more likely to potentially miss these assorted proofs of evolution.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not afraid of tools, and actually half OK with them. But I always find it’s just as fun to smash things to pieces than get all glassy-eyed, rambling about Phaedrus and the true nature of good while taking take apart a stubborn Hello Kitty toaster.
Anyway, 10 screwdrivers sounds more like a decent Christmas party than a thing one could actually use to install a light bulb.
Wait, you don’t need screwdrivers to do that, do you? But make mine a double if you’re already up.
Nineteen widowed socks for Day 19 of the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 19
Yesterday finding tools to give away was extremely stressful because of imagining future emergencies confronted without the right equipment.
Today was tricky for a different reason — the abandoning of hope.
Now that might sound dramatic when talking about solitary socks, but each one is like a little candle held in the dark, hoping for its twin to show up. As if you don’t have a few kicking — well, not kicking — around.
To send one off, you have to admit a moment of mismanagement, of neglect. It’s the tiniest of breakups.
A couple of years ago, Elizabeth Withey did a lovely art project called One Hundred Widows at Latitude 53, where she called single earrings “tiny potholes of loss.” You can read all that here, http://onehundredwidows.tumblr.com/. It was a little influential in my decision to go through this very public, often embarrassing dumpster dance. I won’t be following her lead by wearing a dress for a year, don’t worry. Well, I mean, for enough money …
So, funny how peer pressure works. I used to tease a former roommate for wearing mismatched socks, and actor Matthew Grey Gubler (Intern No. 1 from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) sprained his ankle on set wearing a matching pair for the first time in years.
Some of these sushi-rolled socks are holdouts from the late ’80s. Others, like that awesome pink tube with the David Bowie lightning bolt, hit the streets maybe twice until whatever mysterious spirit raccoon who takes away all our socks into the phantom ether decided it was Time.
Thank you for your service, lonely, lonely socks.
An acoustic guitar and a pile of CDs.
The Minimalism Game — Day 20
Remember when CDs first showed up in our lives and everyone pretended they were indestructible?
They won’t skip and they’ll last forever, the line went — but of course, nothing ever does.
Disc rot, bronzing and that extra spastic way a scratched CD Ginsu-stabs a song to bits are all things to keep in mind next time some retailer tells you the latest gadget will render obsolescence itself obsolete.
Still, I kind of pity the fragile CD, unloved and collecting dust at Superflea.
The way we listen to music these days splits mostly into two camps: completely digital, or ritual-object vinyl and indie-music cassettes. There’s simply nothing cool about CDs right now. Except, of course, that that actually makes them kind of cool — the fact no one’s into them.
To tell you the truth, I actually bought a used portable CD player the other day — CDs, let’s not forget, actually sound terrific.
You can see by the sweep of this batch of discs I worked backward from Z to N: some real treasures like Britney Spears’s first album and a dub collection put out by a condom company. Threw some CanCon in there with Maestro Fresh Wes and Sloan in case the CRTC is monitoring, and a few noisy Japanese albums to spice it all up.
The acoustic guitar was included mostly for a prettier backdrop, but it’s another redundancy so off to a better home!
Let me guess, you want that, too?
A random assortment of clutter heading out the door.
The Minimalism Game — Day 21
A metal detector; nine paper roses; a stack of political magazines; a digital photo frame — can you analyze these five clues to solve the thematic mystery of these items by the end of this post?
Just kidding, they’re totally just random clutter. Uh, I guess that’s technically something in common.
Pulling together these items felt more like how the Minimalism Game is supposed to be played. To be honest, I’ve been really jealous of anyone doing this without the thematic daily photo shoot and broadcast attached. So today was a breeze — and another box out of the apartment!
Still, some lessons. That digital photo frame still in its packaging after years reminds us there’s no point keeping things around that you haven’t bothered using yet. This especially applies to cats and open mayonnaise.
On the other side of that, when exactly do you think you’re going to reread those old magazines? Mind you, according to the back issues of Avenue, Edmonton’s apparently just the best place ever! Oilers!
The roses — no idea where those are from. Hopefully they’re not my wife’s prized possession, sitting as they were at the bottom of a box.
And the metal detector is actually borrowed. We used to live in a place with a huge yard, total pain to rake. About 30 bags in (seriously) I noticed I no longer had a wedding ring. Whoopsie — but my wife was understandably upset.
One Facebook cry for help later and my friend Rob loaned me the metal detector and we found the ring. Like, years ago. Sorry for pulling a Fred Flintstone on you, dawg! It’s all yours, with some bonus roses and anything else you want in this photo.
Loads of redundant and spent art supplies are going on Day 22.
The Minimalism Game — Day 22
By a certain count — if you tick off every pompom, crayon and stick of chalk — today’s batch of Minimalist Game victims numbers in the hundreds.
But also, because I’m exhausted and definitely losing it a bit, when I woke up at dawn to pick these out, I accidentally grabbed 31 things and packages — fantasizing about the last day, perhaps. May as well roll with the free bananas, as no one says, ever!
Some of these supplies come from as far away as Japan, like that beloved zipper-broken pencil case, and as far back as the 1960s. The tin of mostly spent paints survived from my aunt’s childhood in Gramma’s big old house in north Edmonton, as well as a couple of other tins I kept with some extremely politically incorrect images on the front.
Believe it or not, I had two boxes of chalk, same with crayons, same with the paper cutter. And that crawling microbug kit is a soldering project I’m going to pass along to my solder otter friend Curtis, who likes inhaling the essence of close-up toxic fumes more than me.
I’m such a goober that I kept that Jack Daniels tin to — at some point in the imagined future — fill with unknown tall, skinny art supplies. Paintbrushes? Pipe cleaners? Another bottle of whiskey? Who knows, so out it goes!
And I don’t even really understand what the hell that Staedler pen set is. Bye bye.
Oh yeah: all of this stuff came from one drawer. What’s the word for wonderful and pathetic at the same time?
Fish Griwkowsky let his wife Dara pick 23 items for Day 23 of the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 23
To keep things interesting I decided to shake things up today and let my wife Dara pick 23 things she wanted me to get rid of. Knowing her natural mandate to simplify, she was thrilled, and I got to call it an early Christmas present.
“Does that mean I get to pick everything and you have to give it away no matter what?” she asked radiantly.
Uh, well, not exactly.
What ended up happening was sort of a Moroccan street market haggle. She’d go for something I thought might fit into a theme in the next few days, for example, and I’d say no. And we wrestled over a very dusty Casio organ my dad bought me a decade back.
“We got through those 23 things pretty quickly,” she observed, “but you still didn’t give away some of the things I wanted you to. Like that bass guitar. You don’t know how to play and I’ve never seen you play it. Didn’t you already give it to your sister? Why do you still have it? Do you think you’re Geddy Lee?”
More like Geezer Butler, in more ways than one.
But away the organ went, as well as some stuffed monkeys with magnet hands, Japanese Visine from a trip 20 years ago, my historical collection of bladeless Gillette razors, a drill with no charger, a used yet coveted roll of gauze, my grandmother’s busted bird clock, some super-useful flute cases, an old iPod stereo with volume-control issues, a cardboard deer head and, of course, a square of fake lawn that was the subject of hurtful mockery when I first brought it home this summer.
“What are you going to do with that, exactly?” Dara asked patiently, wondering how her life became this. “You know,” I stalled. “Stuff?”
But now it’s gone. So if you ever go out onto your fake lawn and there’s a small square missing, carved out by Astroturf criminals, I’m just not your guy anymore. Someone else is going to have to save you: daddy’s gone, daddy’s gone.
What’s more of a space-waster than a bunch of empty boxes? Out they go in Day 24 of the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 24
I was Skyping Supreme Commander Snoke while he was planted on his Abraham Lincoln toilet the other day and he said Kylo Ren is really coming along lately.
Mass murder, talking funny, getting mutilated — the check marks are all being ticked off on Kylo’s hateful path to the Dark Side! But Gollum’s brother Snoke was pretty concerned about one nagging thing: the kid’s been hoarding all the boxes from his light sabre parts ordered from Radio Shack like an Alabama cat lady.
The phrase “mint in box” describes a coveted status in the world of Star Wars — the ultimate accomplishment for the obsessive, often misunderstood, adult collector sacrificing everything and everyone to get down with a pair of Ewok children’s slippers from 1983.
Unfortunately, “mint in box” doesn’t usually squeeze much juice in the real world, especially if it’s describing that pristine package of Sudafed. Suh-weet score, boss. And yet we all keep boxes.
The idea, I think, is some combination of thinking perfectly designed packaging will be handy in some future move and the fact, particularly with electronics, that we want to maintain everything we dropped those major dimes on.
But consider this: you already do not have enough boxes for that move; that trip to the Safeway dumpster is happening no matter what. Let me know if you spot anything good there, PS.
The boxes pictured here mean nothing to me, but I thank them for getting some things I like into my life.
Lord knows how long I would’ve held onto that microphone stand box if not for the Minimalism Game, though. I’m looking at you, Kylo Ren.
After today, still a week left, we can now move through our apartment more freely. If you’re hesitating about taking a swing at this exercise in January, just don’t.
—-
For the Minimalism Game Day 25, treats from the Italian Centre for the Food Bank.
The Minimalism Game — Day 25
Many in the well-connected tinfoil-hat brigade are desperately trying to reverse-engineer a pre-existing global economic slowdown’s nefarious cause as being local politicians aiming to actually diversify our single-source, boom-bust economy for the first time ever. Yet there exist a great number of people among us who have been actually suffering all along.
Sure, entirely eliminating poverty and creating true equality are each as mathematically impossible as cynics claim. Someone is always going to slip through the cracks; someone will always screw someone else over. And as the singing protagonist in Jesus Christ Superstar shrieks, “There’s too many of them!”
But striving in the direction of these ideals is obviously worth it, if you have the means and will to help.
One of the ugliest underlying truths that immediately emerges playing the Minimalism Game is nothing you’re going to find in cute self-help books on tidying your home: compared to most people on this teeming planet, most of us here are atrociously lucky.
Complaining about having too much stuff, which I’ve done my best (and failed) not to directly do, is a harsh-light portrait of here and now, one few ancients beyond kings could even fathom, never mind believe.
It’s the dark blood running through this exercise, and to offset the shame I’m doing my best to pass one-time treasures along to people who might appreciate or benefit from them. Many have suggested organizationa open to donations, so thanks to them.
The best I’ve honestly felt during this whole song and dance is walking through the Italian Centre, picking out treats I’d really enjoy eating, all aimed directly at the Food Bank.
I know it’s an insignificant gesture, and I’m also getting rid of 25 board canvasses (not pictured) just in case any of you think I’m cheating the ultimately self-obsessed spirit of the Minimalism Game.
Day 26 of the Minimalism Game: three record players and a pile of LPs.
The Minimalism Game — Day 26
Good grief today was hell. I’m covered in sweat, dehydrated and smell like a bar rag.
It would’ve taken me two trips and change to haul this crap over to the Journal photo studio this sunny morning, but thankfully lovely Dara helped with this, the heaviest load yet — including emotionally.
That birthday princess drama coming out of my brain’s probably just Minimalism Game burnout talking, actually. I’m tired.
But as much as I’d love to sleep for the rest of my life at this point, the immediate, inverse-to-the-pain pleasure gained in having two extra shelves free, plus more breathing room for the records I kept, is palpable and comforting, like a giant steel robot with one’s mother’s face on it.
As with two weeks ago, it was pretty easy to pull out 21 LPs I’m never going to listen to; sorry about your luck, Neil Diamond, KISS and the Chevrolet Safe Driving Singers. There are also a couple of record mats buried in the pile.
Those record players are in various states of disrepair, you should know. The beautiful bubble one (my third) works basically randomly, kept around for parts. It’s just the sort of thing someone who actually knows how to repair a record player should have. That man is not me, and it’s probably not you, either.
The one on the right is actually awesome, but the fact I’m currently listening to the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s Charlie Brown Christmas a day late on yet another record player underlines a central point of this whole exercise: stop living in a flea market dumpster, you idiot.
No fewer than 27 T-shirts and tops are going to a better place in the fifth-last day of the Minimalism Game.
The Minimalism Game — Day 27
You see it perhaps most strongly at the pop-culture fairs, the way humans define ourselves by what we pay to wear.
The common themes: Batman, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Walking Dead — it’s a pandemic of loosely fitting T-shirts and varying hygiene.
But we before scoff at the nerds too much, it’s not like they’re alone in shelling out to fit in by wearing the uniform of a particular chosen corporate fraternity.
I remember years ago someone teasing me for buying an SNFU shirt at a festival. “Like they need the money,” was the gist of it. Point being, around ’93, SNFU wa