Escaping your possessions

The incessant march of technology leaves mountains of redundancy in its wake. Fridges, televisions, computers, videos and millions of other old and useless gadgets accumulate on landfill sites. We dispose of them because they make us look out of date and uncool. That’s not me, you say to the unfashionable MFI sofa, I’m new, contemporary or, if I can afford it, sometimes even vintage.

There are few better times to get a glimpse of who you are than when you have to move house. It is at this point that all the things you own reveal their true weight. Going up into our loft I found boxes of LPs that I hadn’t played in the year since my record player broke. I wondered if I were the type of person who still had records? Maybe I could be the type of person who was free of such 20th Century detritus?

Memories of sublime pleasures clung to those records, nostalgic visions of teenage romance—teenage trauma—of a time when I was so intensely and self-consciously alive that I thought I might self-combust. What are we to do with plangent evocations such as these? We can’t go back, we can’t change what happened, and – it doesn’t matter what you say—we must live in the present. I realised that I could either walk forward faced forwards or I could stumble along with my neck cricked round. All this useless stuff, all the stuff that said nothing to me about my life now, it had to go. Records, books, furniture, clothes, anything that didn’t support me had do go.

The more one thinks along these lines, the more confident one becomes in one’s freespiritedness. All possessions come to feel like an encumberance. As such, I relish an age without objects, where all music has become zeros and ones. I was reminded of Michael Landy’s installation art piece of destroying every possession he owned. What a sublime act of defiance! How nice to have blank slate for the future ahead! So I slung the heavy bag of records over my shoulder, clambered onto my bicycle and set off for the record shop on Otago Lane.

Before entering the shop, I practised my lines and attempted to affect a look of insouciance. “Hi, I’ve got some, er, records here and wondered if you wanted to, um, take a look?“ Don’t look desperate, I told myself.

Alas, desperation was everywhere. The shop stank of it with its accumulation of swiftly devaluing stock. Before me in the queue is a man in a grimey beige jacket, the type of polyester jacket that impecunious pensioners buy for £12 from a downmarket department stores. The records of his youth, perhaps useless to him now, dead weight in his deadweight of a life, were disposed of. The men in the shop say that they can take ten, but not the rest. He inveighs them to take the lot, he doesn’t want them, and they reluctantly agree.

The two hepcat record shop dudes, one with facial hair and they other a smirk, take my records from me. They see patsies like me every day, people looking for money, trying to rid themselves of their past. They go through them one by one, inspecting the quality of the vinyl and totting up the potential value. I expected to get at least £40 – they are worth more but I’m not greedy – but they offer me £20. With an enthusiastic croak, I accept.

Instantly, I realise that I have been well and truly diddled and that I’m not going to do anything about it. I feel so stupid and sigh as they doled out the crumpled fivers. Then suddenly my mood lifted. Even though I had been diddled, I was free! Those useless possessions were no longer mine. It was they would have to live with being the type of people who are surrounded by musty records, not me. I felt a resurgent sense of potential, that I could do whatever I liked.

It is this, I would argue, that makes it so essential to escape your possessions. Every time you cling onto something that is no longer relevant to who you are now, you reduce your possibilities for the future. So don’t envy those people who kept their Star Wars figures pristine when you took yours to the charity shop, pity them. You are free.

This article was originally published in issue two of New Escapologist magazine.

Read my other New Escapologist articles.