You have to start easy.

I am the direct descendant of a serious hoarder. Like her, there was a point in my life when I felt I had to keep everything. Because I considered meaning to be directly correlated to object, I feared that without the tangibles, I would lose emotional significance. This notion is not only WRONG, but it is dangerous.

There are things to keep, and there are things that paralyze you when you come across them. The latter you must get rid of, because really, what are they doing for you? This realization activated a period (which really frustrated my roommate Morgan), when I became throw-away-happy and decided to ditch nearly everything in my path (including Morgan's groceries, sorry love). Both extremes are dangerous. There has to be a healthy balance between keeping and throwing away, and the same is true for intangibles. Which behaviors, activities, ideologies, memories, etc. are helping me, and which are not?

Personally, I am of the unfortunate ones who, inspired by their sense of duty to a variety of things, fill their thoughts and lives with meaningless, obligatory, hyperbole, unhealthy shit. This practice has become so second-nature that I hardly even notice, and then suddenly I'm stressed out, knee-deep in a situation that I don't actually care about, or making a big deal of things that don't really affect me. In order to break the cycle, a delicate balance is necessary. I'm not exactly sure how to find that balance, so I have to start slow. Today, I asked myself: what is something I can definitely weed out of my life, and be happy because of it? Today, myself answered: cover bands.

Last night, by some weird twist of fate, I ended up at one of the most horrifying bars that I've ever been to: Steinert's. There were old women in halter tops and young women with Bump-its as far as the eye could see. Most of them were grinding on one another or mouthing the lyrics to "Pour Some Sugar On Me" to their boyfriends. The band was headed by a front man who sported a muscle tank that showed off the tribal tattoo encircling his bicep. He was passionately singing and gesturing provocatively, but not playing an instrument (I was told he's not great at simultaneously doing both). All the girls swooned as he held the mic to his lips and said, "this next one's about naked chics". Thank God for Barley Island's Dirty Helen, which was helping me transform my anger into a more approachable state of annoyance. Also thanks to Dirty Helen, I came to the joyous realization that I could easily never witness a cover band ever again, and thank myself for it later in life. I'm not saying that musicians in cover bands aren't talented, because often the opposite is true. But because there's no way I can't consider a CB somewhat tragic (especially the crowds that follow them), and because those tragic sentiments will inevitably leave me questioning the decency of humanity, I'm just going distance myself from any type of CB activity. I nearly never see cover bands, so this is an easy start to my simplification process. Yet, already I feel somewhat lighter.