I am wondering if any of my six regular readers have ever seen George Carlin’s monologue about “stuff.” I think it came out in the late 1980s or so and was pretty funny. He bemoaned the fact that he had so much stuff he had to buy a bigger place to live just accommodate his stuff, and he couldn’t travel unless his stuff went with him. He thought we all probably had way more stuff than we needed and wondered why we continued to pursue the acquisition of more stuff.
I need to have a video of that monologue on a continuous loop on my computer. I need to see it every time I power up that darn computer. Maybe then, I would spend less time being busy with social media, online news, shopping sites, and email communications.
I have way too much stuff and I should be concentrating on getting rid of it instead of fiddling around with computer connections.
My children do not seem to even want their own stuff, much less my stuff, so I am going try something different. I am thinking about offering some of my stuff to you, hoping it will become your stuff and you can take care of it. I am going to start with a stack of big slate blackboards.
It seems The Mister had a penchant for attending auctions long before he himself got into the auction business. He went to a sale of items from the old three-story Peabody Elementary School way back in the late 1970s. He bought a stack of slate blackboards at the sale, because of course, everyone should have a stack of old blackboard slate for future projects such as — what? Beats me.
However, he brought them home and stashed them in the two-seater outhouse in our backyard. Yes, it is true we have an outhouse. The slate blackboards are still stacked on the floor and the poor old outhouse is developing a structural problem. After 40-some years, the weight of those blackboards has caused the outhouse to tip forward a bit and the floor seems to be separating from the building.
I hate it when that happens. I want to save my little outhouse building. It goes with the property and is sort of cute. I need to get rid of the slabs of slate. I have no idea if they all are intact or if some have cracked. I do not care. The Daughters think I should sell it because, if you look on eBay, it is listed about $100 per blackboard. I still do not care. I just want to save my little building.
So here is the deal. Call me if you want a slate blackboard from the original Peabody High School, later turned Peabody Elementary School. I am in the telephone book. You can have one, no charge. I certainly think there might be several people that would like to have one, so for now I am not going to give them all to one person. If I get no requests, I will figure out another way to redistribute them and you may get lucky.
Give me a call, save me from my stuff.
— SUSAN MARSHALL