Publish or Perish

I’ve been living and working in Kingston, Ontario for over a week now, finding my second home (Nicole’s apartment on Princess Street) to be a natural fit. Quarters are a little close sometimes but we have been managing well. Unlike Nicole’s place in Toronto, there wasn’t much that needed to be purchased or organized to make it livable for both of us. She and the cats seem to be quite happy here, and I’m happy to be with them as much as I can.

Kingston itself seems pretty nice; a small city by Ontario standards, about 125,000, many of whom are students. The Queen’s campus is lovely, all stone cathedrals and a few modern structures, surrounded by a “student ghetto” of identical rented townhouses. Nicole lives on one of the main thoroughfares, just out of the main retail area and mercifully away from the bars where bros line up to power drink. As you get closer to the waterfront, the retail part of Princess Street has some lovely book and record stores, the usual array of college-friendly clothing outlets, and many restaurants. There is even a small Buddhist centre, where I went today for lunchtime meditation.

Entertainment options seem decent too, with a variety of clubs (Sloan is playing at one next week), a multiplex with non-stadium seats on Princess Street and an excellent student ticket combo, a public square with a farmer’s market on the weekend and the unfortunately named “K-Rock Centre” for sports events and concerts. A nice sort of multipurpose park for kids is a couple of streets away, and somewhere out of town is a bigger park that includes paintball, mini-golf, batting cages, and a three-screen drive-in.

Kingston reminds me of Halifax in a lot of ways; the omnipresent student population, the waterfront development (lakefront in this case), the mixture of low culture and midlevel couture that you find on Princess is echoed in the walk from Barrington to Spring Garden Road. Unlike Halifax, I can’t see myself wanting to settle here for the very long term – not yet anyway – but it is a very nice place to visit and I am already looking forward to returning.

An inevitable side effect of moving is realizing just how much Stuff you have. And wondering where it all came from, and realizing you haven’t seen some of it since the last move, and trying to remember why you held on to it then.

As I mentioned recently, I am trying to get rid of a lot of Stuff and trying to be unsentimental about it. At the same time I don’t want to simply put all the Stuff in the bin; someone might be able to use this Stuff, after all, so it gets sorted into a different pile for donations to the Salvation Army or Value Village or wherever. And then you look at that Stuff and you think “hm, moving is expensive and I did invest a lot of money and time in this Stuff, why shouldn’t I get something back out of it?” And so the sort of valuable Stuff gets sorted into a third pile of Stuff you will try to sell on Kijiji or at pawnshops or used book stores.

Only that Stuff doesn’t sell, and the other Stuff has been given or thrown away, so you tell yourself “it would be a shame to just toss it now, if I’m not going to get anything for it I may as well just hang on to it.” And so you wind up with a few more boxes of Stuff to puzzle over the next time you pack up. I was thinking today that this pattern of acquisition and retention of largely plastic goods is relatively new to the human condition. Our grandparents probably never wondered why they had all their Stuff. Most things had a specific purpose, were designed and manufactured to last more than a year or two, and if it was passed on to someone else, it was out of sentimental value.

What are you passing on to your grandchildren? A VHS Director’s Cut of Titanic? A Motorola StarTac? Nirvana’s “Nevermind” on vinyl?

Throw all that useless shit away.