Brad Westness.com

Last month, my girlfriend decided to have a rummage sale in order to help finance our trip to Florida. I decided that it seemed like a good opportunity to get rid of some clutter, so I donated about a third of my DVD collection (the least desirable third, of course) hoping to make some gas money for the trip, and also reduce some clutter around my already cluttered apartment. I’m one of those people who enjoys collecting, it doesn’t really matter what it is, I like to collect it.

I had fallen into the trap of thinking of my DVD collection as a great heirloom, a legacy that would be passed to future generations. This might have been a believable prospect if my movie tastes were not quite so… specific. I don’t know how much my progeny would have really relished inheriting the slew of “so-bad-its-good” slasher flicks and five-dollar-bin Wal-Mart “treasures” that I had amassed. This collection wasn’t exactly a focused primer that would introduce future generations to meaningful and important movements in film history, so much as a series of stacks of objects covering every conceivable surface in apartment of a person who at some point decided it was necessary not just to see, but to own every Coen Brothers, Terry Gilliam, and Broken Lizard film [see also: Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, et cetera (although I didn't sell any of those)].

It was not uncommon to catch myself thinking “of course I need to own Smokey and the Bandit” while perusing a pile of forgotten and unloved films populating a discount bin in some disreputable chain store. I wasn’t just going to watch it one time, fulfilling my curiosity about exactly how many dirty double-entendres flew over my ten-year-old head last time I saw it at my grandmother’s house. That could clearly be accomplished by renting it for less even than the tantalizingly low “bin” price of five dollars. No, I needed to own Smokey and the Bandit. I needed to have it. How else would I be “the guy that has all the DVDs” among my circle of friends? How else could I continue to delude myself that by maintaining a large DVD collection I was performing some sort of public service? That this was not for me, it was for anyone who wanted to borrow one of my movies, so they could be enriched? The only problem being that I never did lend them out. Turns out nobody was dying to borrow Splash or Bachelor Party.

So I sold them all. Of course, in this instance “all” means “only the ones I knew I was not ever going to miss,” which amounted to about a hundred of them. I still have three DVD shelves full of things like the cartoon version of Animal Farm. But those are important. And you know what happened? It felt great. It was a load off of my shoulders to no-longer knock over a stack of plastic disc containers every time I went to set something on an end-table. Even more so than the quick cash we made off of the rummage sale, I enjoyed the freedom of feeling like it was ok to rent movies. I signed up for Netflix. I don’t need to own everything. I used to sneer and feel superior to anyone who would even consider paying to stream music, but now I see the attraction. To quote one of the movies I ironically did not sell, “the things you own end up owning you.”

And while I’m not quite ready to give up purchasing hard-copies of my music (how else can you look at several arbitrary photos upon first purchasing an album?) I can see the attraction in not having to store a thousand jewel cases everywhere. So while I will continue to prefer owning a hard copy of the movies and music that I honestly, truly want to watch or listen to over and over, I think I’ve at least begun to kick the habit of wanting to own the complete discography of every artist that piques my interest.

As technology progresses (and multiple streaming services continue to undercut and out-feature each other) it’s just as easy to instantly stream a movie when you want to view it as it is to get it off of your shelf. There are increasingly fewer benefits to owning a movie if you can watch it whenever you want online anyway, in just as high fidelity, without having to store the disc and box in your house.

I was never a fan of purchasing digital movies or music files, and have been fairly vocal about my disapproval, and that still applies. I don’t want to pay money for a single download of an MP3 or Mp4, but I will pay a monthly fee to be able to access them whenever I want, while someone else (in “the cloud”) deals with the bother of maintaining and backing up all those gigabytes.

And as careful as I’ve been in the past to only ever buy the most “special” edition of any movie or album, I have to admit that I’ve only ever actually watched the few that were of great personal interest to begin with (Lord of the Rings, the Broken Lizard movies) while finding the vast majority of “behind-the-scenes” documentaries and director’s commentaries to be tedious and wholly unnecessary.

So last month, when eBay began offering five free auction listings a month to its members, I lept at the opportunity to rid myself of some more clutter that I had collected over the years. A couple of my cohorts thought I would regret “selling everything” when I listed a few 90-hour Super Nintendo RPGs that I never intended to play again, or feared that I was giving up the dream by selling my electric guitar and amp (when truthfully I am just replacing them with ones that, while being slightly less fancy, I like better).

Anyway, the point is, someone else can bother themselves about owning Tom Hanks’ complete filmography, or every Square-Enix game, or retaining every single piece of music equipment that ever passes through their hands. For now at least, I’m embracing the stream. When an opportunity to shed some ballast presents itself, I will honestly determine if that object really adds any quality to my existence. If not, I will let it flow out of my life with the hope that it will find its way into the hands of someone to whom it will.