I was at an indoor market today. For those who don’t know, it’s all stalls of food, vegetables, fruit, bread, fish, meat, cured meats, shoes, clothes, and anything else you can think of. You’ll say, “Fantastic! Wonderful! Marvelous!” Well, they are environments I hate. Total confusion, people stepping on you and overtaking you at the first hesitation, thieves, noise at a champion level. At least the products are on average good, but I can’t stand it because I usually get overwhelmed by the urge to beat everyone with a stick. Today, however, I remained calm, and that fact gave me a lot of satisfaction. I should try going there as a customer sometime and see how I manage the situation. It seems like a minor problem, but I go to supermarkets where I have all the time I want to choose and where contact with people is almost reduced to a minimum, if not just with the cashier on duty. When people cut me off or move my cart, I’d feel like burning them with a flamethrower, you goddamn morons! Anyway, in the end, I save myself because I only do groceries once a week.

Let’s return to the real topic of the day: serial hoarders! I’ve known and still know several of them. I haven’t studied the issue in depth, but I’ve realized they have many traits in common. Among those I know, many justify their object accumulation by saying the items are still good, that “they don’t make stuff like this anymore,” and that if they repaired them, they’d be worth millions of billions of dollars! Most of the time, they will never repair a damn thing they accumulate! Others hoard because “it might always be useful sooner or later!”

My mother hoarded plastic jars and bottles. Do you know how many jars accumulated in the attic I threw away after her death? 243! The attic was $1.75$ square meters. A little less for plastic bottles because once the water was finished, I’d take them and hide them behind the living room sofa to throw them away later, otherwise my mother would have taken and hidden them around the house to then turn them into bottles for watering the geraniums! In the summer, my parents always went on vacation to their parents’ town, and I had to look after the plants. Well, I counted 120 bottles and managed to reduce them to 80. The following summer, I managed to reduce them to 40, thanks also to my father, who managed to reduce the number of plants from 50 to 23—a real feat! Now I’ve thrown them all away.

I know a person who hoarded every type of DIY tool: drills, chainsaws, strimmers, tractors, screwdrivers, drill bits, power drivers, various sets of lathes, band saws, circular saws, milling cutters… everything! He has two workshops full of this stuff, only most of it no longer works or he’s never used it! Oh well, you can’t even get inside the workshops, so it’s hard to estimate how much stuff he has. He also has two televisions from the ’70s. The funny thing is he’s also jealous of his stuff—stuff that, if it once had value, now you’d have to pay to have it taken away.

I try not to see these people as ill, but I see them living stressed, paranoid, and angry, and I see serial hoarding as a response to some stress caused by the outside world, and it’s difficult to intervene. Psychotherapy is always a path I would recommend to such people, but the problem is that for them, that’s not the problem; on the contrary, accumulating things is actually the solution to their problems; it’s an activity that calms them down, making the world less frightening. However, the idea I’ve formed is that it only accelerates their social withdrawal.

There’s even a mission in a chapter of the Yakuza video game where the protagonist has to bring a shop owner, who has become a serial hoarder, back to his senses by filling his shop with trash and causing inconvenience to the neighbors. That’s fiction, and they manage to help the owner, but in real life, it’s a nearly impossible task unless you have a circle of friends or relatives willing to lend a hand.

I am the nemesis of serial hoarders; I eliminate everything! My loved ones’ clothes and garments? Donated to the parish Caritas. Objects I wasn’t using? Given away or broken and thrown into the trash bins. I follow a philosophy: better to have 10 things I use than 400 waiting for the event to use them. If I need something, I’ll buy it. Having too many things complicates the management of my life. Better to have few things but know how to exploit them to the fullest. I remember that in 2009, I had an M-Audio sound card with one channel for guitar and one for the microphone, I had Guitar Rig 4 and Addictive Drums, and at that time, I managed to be more creative than I am now because I had to make the most of the little I had to achieve what I had in mind, whereas now it’s more difficult because having so many libraries distracts me, wastes my time and my psycho-physical resources. Fortunately, I’m quite disciplined and manage to save myself, but before, it was paradoxically simpler because I knew those two or three things I used inside out, managing to have satisfying artistic flashes.

I intend to compose other songs at the beginning of next year. I hope I still have something different to say. It’s always an examination with myself to see if I can still come up with something new and captivating! It won’t be easy… I hope the music I’m feeding my brain nourishes it enough to achieve what I have in mind—an addictive song, a musical drug! I want to see if I’ll have the ability now that my brain is still functioning. Next Tuesday, I’ll write about a band that particularly influenced me despite the danger of their music. Talk soon.