As my childhood home was in the process of being sold, all of my earthly possessions since birth either lived in the attic or in plain sight in my bedroom. I'll spare you the monotonous details of packing boxes. Anyone who's ever had to transport several items across a significant distance - which is pretty much anyone - already understands this. Being a somewhat sentimental creature, I resorted to packing up virtually everything I had accumulated over the course of my existence and throwing away next to nothing. The fact that I'm stupidly indecisive about a lot of things also helped along with that.
Making a hasty exit from that house, I, along with a lot of material possessions, made it to the house I'm currently residing in. Whilst my opinion of the dwelling is that it's purely a university house, it's nevertheless served as my home for a good year and a half whilst my parents have made separate living arrangements for themselves. Through this, I pretty much got it into my 22-year-old head that I couldn't rely on them for storage space and that I needed to grow up - a sentiment I still hold to this day. As I approach the 24th anniversary of me being alive, I still feel the need to grow up, yet feel more grown up than I did some two years ago. I don't know how this happened exactly, I'm just glad it did. But it has meant that over the last week or so I've needed to confront my indecisive demons and force them to decide things. Mostly over what I should or shouldn't throw away.
My uni house, a.k.a. my current house, is a four-bedroomed piece of architecture shared by three people. The reasons for this are many, but essentially boil down to the fact that we were a group of three looking for anywhere to live independently. The four-bedrooms of the one place we looked at, a.k.a. my current house, a.k.a. my uni house, essentially boiled down to three decent sized bedrooms and a biscuit tin. That fourth room, whilst spare, was sort of adopted by me as an easy-access attic space. It was there that my boxes of an accumulated childhood stayed... and stayed... and accumulated filth. By "filth" I mean dust, by the way. I felt like I should clarify that considering that this house has been known to get filthy every once in a while (read "once in a while" as "day"). My old possessions gathered dust though, not filth. I feel like I could've just written that and saved us a whole explanation but oh well.
Anyway, recently that dust was wiped away and those boxes have been delved into for probably the first time since they were packed. Using a new method of deciding if I needed it or not, I began to throw virtually everything into several black bin bags. Such items have ranged from school, college and uni notes I don't need any more, board games with missing pieces I haven't thought about for years and a plethora of wires, cables and electrical plugs I've convinced myself will "probably come in handy one day". I have finally resorted to the fact that if one will "probably come in handy one day", I'll probably be able to fucking buy it somewhere.
In amongst all my crap, however, it seems that in the break-up with my old house, I got to keep the VHS tapes. As a young adult of the Digital Age, I prefer everything modern. See, you'd know this if you actually read all of How A PlayStation Ruined My Life like I told you to at the start of this thing. I've not had a need for VHS tapes for years and neither have my immediate family members. For the most part, in my infinite wisdom of deciding what is and isn't necessary, a large chunk of these tapes have been disposed of (or rather, will be disposed of once I find a big enough outlet). I have made sure to hang onto precious and indispensible memories; home videos of my sister and me as younglings and the like. The large chunk, however, consisted of the occasional rubbish movie, TV recordings of unsequenced Simpsons episodes and an oddly charming yet retrospectively disturbing manifestation of how a videotape improved my maths skills as a child. Thanks to the gods of YouTube, I don't need to rely on that dusty VHS any more since the whole thing exists virtually. If, by any chance, you have an hour to spare, I strongly recommend that you waste it on this, just to see how incredibly ridiculous, patronising and dated the whole thing is. WARNING: Contains Carol Vorderman.
Needless to say, being able to rap the two times table and only reciting multiples of ten whilst wearing sunglasses and ripped leggings are not skills that have stayed with me to this day. However, like a lot of those boxed away possessions, the mere sight of the tape allowed me to reminisce over a childhood gone by. High school photographs and yearbooks put me in mind of a time of bad handwriting and when having a buzz cut was cool. A box of Tri-ominos has reminded me of how I've never actually played Tri-ominos. Small black T-shirts and studded belts are soaked in the memories of an ill-fated attempt at a teenage emo phase. And what I once referred to as a "big fucking grey behemoth box" is nay but a gatherer of big fucking grey dust.
I've not used the Sony PlayStation for a good number of years to be totally honest; any old game I own that is actually worth playing over and over has the ability to be used on a PS2. As sad as it sounds, my newfound decisive attitude told me that the era was over and that, after fourteen-and-a-half years in my possession, the PlayStation had to go. On the other hand, I know the mindset of a geek and what it means to be "retro". I couldn't just throw this piece of late 20th century machinery away willy-nilly; I needed to find it a home, like a puppy I can no longer afford to feed. Modern technology came to the rescue, like the good friend it is to me now. Apple-brand iPad takes digital photo, digital photo gets uploaded to Facebook, Facebook shows everyone I've probably ever met (and maybe one or two I haven't) that I want to offer my PlayStation-shaped puppy to a good home. I want to know that my puppy will be well kept, played with on a regular basis and generally not mistreated. Enter the buyer.
The thing with Facebook is that even if you've met a person once for a total of three minutes and had some form of verbal exchange with them, chances are you'll be connected for life on that social platform. Oftentimes, you'll generally never speak to them ever again, becoming increasingly infuriated by their frequent status updates because you figure that if you don't care, nobody else does. Occasionally, they'll float in and out of your life for moments at a time, making those odd moments fairly entertaining, but not too much that you curl up into a ball and cry hysterically once they've gone. And sometimes, just sometimes, they'll be the kind of people who you come to realise your life would just be totally incomplete without and that if not for one fleeting moment in time, you might never have known this person at all and you feel extremely lucky that you happened to be in the right place at just the right time. My buyer actually belongs the second group.
Meeting a friend of a friend is often awkward in the beginning; you're never quite sure what to expect. I mean, sure, if your friend thinks they're great then they must be great, but there's always a little nagging sensation in the back of the brain that wonders "actually... what if they're not?" Fortunately, after spending several minutes with this guy I figured "eh, you know what, he's not so bad" and during our fleeting real-life encounters we've managed to share deep meaningful conversations about cake icing and discuss at length a dance move known as "The Handlebars". These are just two of (I'm sure) several topics of discussion which my dust-filled brain can't think of right now. But the fact that, while my contact with him may be rare, I know can trust him with looking after my puppy and I know he'll get a lot of joy from playing with my puppy and now I just feel very disturbed by the unintentional beastialic innuendo I just made.
Go, my young old games console. Go and live a new life away from me and my neglectful ways... for now I understand the true value of such retro gaming machinery, which, quite frankly, is one thing that Carol Vorderman never taught me in a video.
