Bill Berends dot com / blog

It seems the older I get the harder it is to manage the overwhelming amount of STUFF accumulating in my house. It is possible I am just slowing down with age… but it doesn’t really feel like that. It feels like there is just an ever increasing amount of stuff piling up with each passing year. Add to that all the virtual stuff I have to deal with and sometimes I just want to burn it all to the ground and start anew. I would save my guitars, amps, computers, some old photos and memoirs perhaps, but that’s about it. So why is it so impossible to get rid of the stuff now?!

Just for example, CD’s… these things have invaded my environment, permeating every spare nook & cranny in the place. From my purchased music collection, to all the discs people give me – and this is a significant number let me tell you, people wanting me to hear their music. I have piles of it waiting to be heard going back years (really, years!) – to the ever increasing number of boxes and piles of backup data from my hard drives, music in various stages of completion, photos, artwork, videos, to studio client backups. It’s mind boggling. I have huge 5 foot four-drawer filing cabinets packed with CD’s, closets full of CD’s, desk drawers and shelves all over the house filled with the things… which now includes DVD’s, either video/movies or backup discs (at least a single DVD can replace 5 CD’s). The funny thing is I can almost never find the particular disc I am looking for at the moment I decide I need it! It’s a nightmare.

Oh, and I forgot to mention software… that’s what got me started on this rant, looking for the driver disc for a video interface I only purchased a few months ago. I have no clue as to where the box may be or the driver disc. Since I want to move it to another machine not connected to the internet (is there still such a thing?!) I need the disc. Damn. There goes tonight’s project, taken out by the stuff. Oh well.

Then there’s mail & magazines…. pile and piles of stuff I thought I’d want to look at at some point or another, various catalogs, an endless stream of special offers, local merchant ads in bundles… I can’t deal with it. I throw them out like mad, toss semi-important looking stuff (like bills) in boxes, then pile other boxes on top of those boxes till I can’t remember why I saved them in the first place. I get some cool magazine subscriptions free, being in the biz and all, but I wish they’d stop at this point! It’s all advertising anyway and I get enough of that online. But they won’t stop no matter how many times I ignore the IMPORTANT – Fill this out to keep you subscription coming. Make it stop, please!!

There’s also the 23 year history of Mastermind in paperwork, boxes and crates of photographs, video cassettes, letters & gifts from fans, business correspondence over the years, concert posters & artifacts, CD inventory & archives, this that and the other thing… it’s nearly a whole spare room full of more stuff! Not to mention all the recent recordings of gigs, rehearsals, etc. I need an intern to keep up!! I can barely imagine what it must be like to be super famous. No wonder big stars ignore everybody and everything. It’s just all too much unless you have some kind of staff to deal with it… which I do not! Other than being onstage with some other people from time to time, this is a one man show. Not that I am complaining, I am grateful for the attention the music has attracted, but just today someone was lamenting I don’t email them like I used to. I’m sorry, I just can’t keep up. Really! I’d be typing 24 hours a day.

Anyway, here we are in the information age and you know what? I get WAY too much information about everything!! And being the curious type I find it hard to tear myself away sometime even though I know ultimately it doesn’t matter AT ALL. The majority of it ends up being a stupid waste of time anyway. So I tear myself away and try to organize the piles and plies and boxes and and boxes of stuff lying all around everywhere. It’s a never ending task and a miracle I get anything done at all.

Not to mention the car parts, bicycles, tools, guitar parts, carpentry, plumbing, household crap, spare speakers, paint cans, antique computer parts, reels of analog tape (closets full), shipping supplies (ebay), and other sundry crap piled up around the other piles. Anywhere there’s a place you can set something, something has been set! It just kills me to look around sometimes.

One of the primary reasons it’s so hard to get rid of stuff is because I know as soon as I throw something away, I’ll need it the next day. It’s happened to me so many times it isn’t even funny. Another reason is, well, it’s cool stuff or I wouldn’t have saved it in the first place! And then there’s the ‘I’ll get around to it someday’ stuff that I never seem to get around to. Funny how that is.

Well, I better get back to searching for that driver disc. I’m sure I’ll find it one day when I’m looking for the matching glove to the single glove I found searching for that damn CD. Life goes on.