Consumerism; Sentimentality

How do we come to attach such strong emotions to mere objects? How is it exactly that we invest memories in THINGS? It seems like maybe our brains are not contained by the skulls that surround them. Rather, they extend into the environment all around us, and they deposit information into whatever is near. It would follow then that the things that are nearest us most often would hold the largest and richest wealths of our experiences.

My truck is officially dead. It needs about $2000 worth of work, which I cannot afford. It's also not really worth $2000 as a vehicle anyways. That's what's called being totaled. Despite my best attempts to not become attached to the things that I own and buy, I have a major attachment to the truck. I keep trying to justify this by remembering all the specific moments in it: learning to drive stick, driving to the darkest spot on the interstate with Julee, finding various trailheads, it getting stolen four times and always finding its way back to me, et cetera. But these seem like veils. This truck is a connection to something for me. My past, maybe? It occurred to me recently that for the first time in my life, I can remember 10 years ago. That scared me. Then the phrase "He didn't make it, not everyone makes it through" came into my head (that phrase comes into my mind all the time). Then I realized that it is likely that there will come a time in my life that I will have lost all of the things that remind me of my childhood or adolescence. That is a sad thought. All of the physical reminders of an important part of my life gone? Where do they all go? Do we just not notice as they leave us, since they generally leave us one at a time?

With the departure of my truck (Birdie), I anticipate perhaps the arrival of a new vehicle. I'm excited about the possible change, but I feel like I'm turning my back on an old friend. The truck is fixable, after all. I just can't afford it. It's going to the scrapyard most likely. It's going to end up a thousand different pieces in a thousand different cars. That's a thousand pieces of me spread around the world in the most cruel and random of ways. Should I worry that I'm losing memories?

“I put a new engine in my car, but forgot to take the old one out. Now my car goes 500 miles per hour. The harmonica sounds amazing.”
-Stephen Wright

“The will is never free -- it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car -- it can't steer.”
-Joyce Cary

“Without struggle, no progress and no result. Every breaking of habit produces a change in the machine.”
-George Gurdjieff

“I think that it's possible to study human intelligence, to know what it's made up of, to break it down into modules in a sense, and then -- little by little -- to build those modules into machines.”
-Justine Cassell