Picked this little beauty up a couple of weeks ago.

Moving shaves a lot of barnacles off the hull. I’ve acquired a lifetime of stuff through a haphazard process, guided by what’s needed that very moment, what briefly attracted my attention and what other people thought would be a nice gift. It all piles up.

An aesthetic chaos, layered like sediment, full of dinosaur bones turned into oil, fossils from previous eras in my life, totters on the brink of becoming a self-aware mess, like some Gaia consciousness made of junk and reproducing through gifts, expressing its will through the holiday impulses of people responding to the emergent order and feeding on sentimentality.

Packing forces some editing. Unpacking forces choices. You kill the old beast and start building the new one. Rather than doing so quickly, driven by expediency or nostalgia, I’ve decided to move very slowly, adopt the same attitude I took with my wardrobe, and try to get it right. Beautiful, useful or sentimental. Everything else goes or never even begins.

This ashtray is the house equivalent of a cufflink but cufflinks are important. In truth, they may be the most important thing ever.