Got room for that?

Think of all the things we have added to our lives recently: The microwave oven, cellular phone, DVD recorder, satellite radio (more on that later) and digital cable television to name some. But, perhaps no other modern device speaks to the advent of modern society more than the external storage area.

There are two such properties being erected now, one in Woodbury Heights and another in Mantua. There is one near the Route 55 interchange in Sewell, and another on Route 322 in Monroe Township. We need these things so badly, that there are four within 10 miles of each other.

The point is, we are collecting so much stuff that we do not have room in our larger and larger homes to store it all, so we have to build places to put things. Why is it necessary to have these things now, when 15 or 20 years ago, they didn't exist? Did we need them and not have them then, or is this desire for storage a product of our cluttered 21st Century lives? I'm thinking the latter.

People collect stuff, for whatever reason, and I suppose if the stuff we collect is too big for the place in which we are collecting it, we build detached buildings that we can use to store our climate controlled junk, because our lives would be so empty without it. Empty, really. After all, the junk is so important that we don't even need to keep it near us, and if we forget about it for a while, we can be forgiven, because "out of sight, out of mind" right?

And what, exactly are people putting in these storage areas? Furniture, old clothes, baby stuff, barbeque grills - I don't know. Personally, if I had so much junk that I needed to rent a place to keep it, I would think about why I had so much junk, not about where to put it.

Maybe that's why Ebay is so popular? We have so much junk, that we have to sell it. We cannot know whether Ebay would have been as popular 30 years ago, for obvious reasons, but I suspect that it has at least something to do with our advanced state of clutter.

So, excuse me, I just remembered I have a flower pot without soil in it. In the trash it goes.