Recycling, the eBay way!

I occurs to me that I spent the better part of this evening posting items for sale on eBay. I probably make the whole process a little more painful that it should be - nice illustrations, a little polish on the description...it's that old marketing training kicking in - but however you cut it, it's pretty time-consuming.

It's not as if I need the money; if I did, I'd go flip burgers in a greasy spoon. I think it's more a reaction to a state of mind that I'm only now beginning to understand.

George Carlin put his finger on it a few years ago in a monologue that spoke of our relation to our "stuff." Much of our lives, noted Carlin, is directed at getting "stuff," getting a job so we can get more money to get more "stuff," and ultimately somehow keeping our "stuff" secure. We buy houses that, basically, serve as warehouses for our "stuff." We move into larger houses when we need more room to store our "stuff," etc. The way he explained it, it was funny, even if most of the people in the audience were guilty, guilty, guilty.

The Russian writer Solzhenitsyn has a take on this idea as well. He noted, in his writings about Soviet labor camps, that it was the prisoners who could not psychologically "divorce" themselves from their possessions in their previous, pre-camp life that suffered the most. In the period immediately after the arrest - the hellish period between "free" life and life in the camp - it was the prisoners who hoped desperately to be reunited with their material possessions who "cracked" first and perished into the Gulag.

In my case, most of my "stuff" consists of books, lots of 'em, accumulated over the years. And frankly, I have a difficult time parting with them, probably more for imagined reasons than for anything you could put your finger on.

Take, for example, the "Harpoon Battle Book," that I spy on the shelf across from me as I type this. I read it (or rather, began to read it) a few years back when I bought it, but I was never able to devote the time required to become skillful at the game the book is based on (Harpoon deals with late 20th century naval warfare). So, the book (and the software) ended up lying around, on exhibit, occasionally reminding me that "someday," I'll have to sit down, relax, and really get into it properly.

Maybe that's the lure, or maybe its antithesis is more repulsive: If I get rid of the book, then I effectively wipe it off of an imaginary list of "to-do someday" items. Symbolically, that's the same as admitting that I don't have all the time in the world left to me, that I'll go to my grave with this little part of my plans unfilfilled.

And yet, having decided to put the book up for sale (it'll go in next week's load, in all likelihood) I have to ask myself: How does selling the book make getting rid of it any more acceptable? I mean, I have no qualms at all selling the book to a willing buyer. What's up?

I think the answer lies in the fact that I'll be getting a little something back in commerce, so it's not as if my whole experience with the book gets written off as a total loss. (There's also the [slight] chance that the item is valuable, as was the case with the OS/2 books I put up for auction a few months ago.) Too, I'll know that someone else - at least theoretically - is going to make use of it. Face is saved, so to speak.

I wonder how much I can get for a genuine National Security Agency flying disk?

Cheers...