Crap we’ve found in old boxes:

A little hand loom for making hot pads and stuff with a photo of two sailors exchanging hand-loomed purses under the BIG LIE WORD “straits”

Goodbye, Dolly!

And goodbye, $200-each-month storage unit!

And hello, $2,400-each-year-sudden-windfall-liquidity! Let’s go to Paris!

Two lamps I have loved, sitting forlornly in storage and awaiting whatever fate they have that I have yet to decide

Epic pants purge! With the discerning help of my fashion-maven niece!

From the left: Give-away shorts. Give-away jeans. Keep shorts. Keep jeans.

Great-read books that rose to the tops of the piles in tonight’s brief excavation of the storage unit:

Two are bipolar. Two are totally gay. One is a fascinating historical-fiction fantasia (Let the Great World Spin—read it!). One is the pre-McSteamy actual reference book that I received for Christmas 1981 back when I had dreams of being an ER doctor. But it qualifies as a great read only if you really REALLY want it to be.

There will be light

My prize liquid-mercury lamps—the only good thing to come out of a dumpster-fire rebound relationship when I found them on one of the little shopping sprees we took together because at least when I was using my credit cards I was interacting with something capable of sustaining a healthy, mutually meaningful, not-shit-crazy-psychopants relationship—are finally out of storage and placed where I’ve long been envisioning their deep-glimmer awesomeness against my new rich-people-blue walls.

And ... meh.

Maybe it’s the relentlessly cruel sunlight screaming through those tiny windows that’s killing the mood. Maybe my freshly Liquid Golded shelves need to tone down their competing shimmer with a healthy layer of dust. Maybe the lamps need a few little knickknacks to tower over in an act of passive-aggressive alpha-lamp dominance.

So ... the four important takeaways here are: 1) another bedroom wall is finally touched up and inspected and back to being hidden behind furniture, 2) I got more crap out of my storage unit, 3) meh, and 4) all this hard work is HARD.

Shit’s gettin’ real, fam!

Real crowded in the center of the room, real dusty, and real HOLY SHIT WHAT GAPING MOUTH OF HELL HAVE I JUST JUMPED INTO?

Painting is stupid. Learn to livelaughlove with your beige.

Things I found in my storage unit today PART III

• A nephew
• A bejeweled jacquard whorehouse lampshade
• A general lack of shame

Things I found in my storage unit today PART II

• A green glass head
• A green headless dressmaking doll
• An apparent history of questionable taste

Things I found in my storage unit today PART I

• A friendly nisse
• Blue suede cake mix
• Prince Albert in a can
• Brett Somers
• Elton John

The good news is I finally unearthed my TV from the vast warehouseness of my storage unit

The other good news is the remote is right here ... in ... one ... of ... these ... boxes ...

When you clean out your spice cupboard and discover you’ve accidentally been running an opium den

EPIC. PURGE.

30+ years of extant pay stubs, boxes of checks from banks that no longer exist, investment statements from companies that long ago dissolved, oversize document packets from multiple refinanced mortgages, receipts from the days when they included complete credit-card numbers, tax documents older that the magic save-for-seven-years rule, rolled-over insurance policies, vested and cashed-in company stock options, long-forgotten parking tickets, repair documents for cars that no doubt now rust in junkyards, and even three neatly folded and carefully notarized wills from before I decided to leave everything I own to the Melania Trump Be Best Foundation For Whatever The Hell Be Best Is Supposed To Mean.

I know lots of it is perfectly safe to be dumped in our recycle bin, but I decided I’d feel safer if all of it were destroyed, so every piece of paper and possibly compromising detail of my life is now locked in a secure container and headed off to be brutally shredded—all for the low, low price of $1 per pound.

I won’t even tell you that it weighed in at a whopping 77 pounds and force you to do the math in your head. But I’m definitely keeping the receipt for the next 30 years.

Treasures I uncovered today in my storage unit, part two:

• My collection of tourist-trap figurines from my world travels that I figured I’d never find again among the bajillion unopened boxes I have yet to spelunk BUT I DID
• The glazed ceramic Eiffel Tower ring stand/change dish I have no business owning because I don’t wear rings or carry change but it’s charming and Francophiley and I love it so shut up
• A red Chicago Marathon cowbell that all the spectators jangled along the race route to keep us fired up or at least running in fear from all the crazy people jangling cowbells at us
• National Treasure, the American Da Vinci Code and my gateway drug to swooning over all things Justin Bartha
• MY HELLA COOL A CHORUS LINE BOOK
• Three stray unmatched socks I thought might possibly pair up with the pile of lonely, forlorn unmatched socks I’ve been holding onto for years just in case their prodigal other halves eventually showed up ... AND TWO OF THEM DID!

Treasures I uncovered today in my storage unit:

• Gershwin “Preludes”: A Festival of Sharps, Accidentals and Hand-Breaking Intervals
• Hy-Vee Hy Value Card from the dawn of the Dark Ages when barcodes and loyalty programs were first invented and scannable plastic key fobs were REVOLUTIONARY UTILITARIAN ACCESSORIES
• 2€ coin from my last whirlwind tour of London, Paris and Barcelona—the European economy and the very status of the UK in the EU have been in precipitous flux since I so carelessly brought it home a decade-plus ago and removed it from European circulation
• Hand-made What Would Fred Do keychain given to me as an opening-night gift by a long-ago Ginger in a long-ago Follies where we’d together looked for Astaire-piration as we choreographed our featured white-tie-and-marabou-trim number
• Adventureland pay stub from my living-the-dream summer of 1986 where I sang and danced up to 13 shows a day, 6 days a week for two-digit wages that even then were probably criminal
• Debussy’s “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum”: A Festival of Flats, Accidentals and Knuckle-Breaking Tempos
• Blockbuster card that’s laminated in plastic so thick it’ll outlast, global warming, thermonuclear annihilation, cockroaches and the trump family’s concurrent prison terms

We are going through TONS of clothes in an epic March to the Purge

which is supposed to be a Civil War reference but it’s not a very good one so if you don’t get it I’ll totally take the blame for making a not-very-accessible allusion but anyway Bitch Kitty has found one of our giveaway piles and decided to send everything remotely dark to Goodwill with a complimentary layer of white fur.

We gays have the best stuff hidden away in our storage units

BY AGE 50 YOU WILL ALSO HAVE:

* Bags of plastic bags hanging on the back doorknob

Sometimes you need to purge 150+ shirts from your bloated collection to stumble on some long-forgotten favorites

And then write referential poetry about them:

I purged my shirts, said Hoarder Jake,
Clear-cutting outfits in my wake.
A striped one here, a solid there,
Pink ones that match my underwear.

Deforestation of my shirts
Hits the clutter where it hurts,
But makes a clever metaphor
For Dr. Seuss’s Lorax lore.

I am the Onceler of my clothes,
And in eliminating those
That fill my boxes, shelves and drawers
I find the ones I want to wores.

Things I Have Found While Excavating Boxes Of Music, Scripts, Programs, Headshots, Did I Mention Music Oh So Much Illegally Photocopied Music And Other Theater Crap I Have Saved Since Before Les Misérables Even Existed If You Can Believe Theater History Ever Went Back That Far: