Shorten the hair, add 50 pounds and that's a pretty good likeness of the ol' Gutmeister himself.
I don’t know about your house, but at my house, my garage is, theoretically speaking, MY space. I say theoretically because that’s the only time it’s truly my space, in theory. You see, in South Carolina we don’t have basements in many of our homes. They say it’s because of the water table, but frankly I think it’s because they never learned how to use the digging equipment and just called it a day. What I’m saying is, this state doesn’t produce a lot of MENSA candidates.
So anyhow, in our house we have a tiny attic, few closets and no basement to store all of our stuff in. Naturally, that building out there next to the house is just sitting there, empty, why shouldn’t everyone just pile their unwanted (but wanted enough to not throw out) crap into? It’s just sitting there, begging to be filled like an eager to please adult film actress on her first day on the job. And out goes the extra chairs. Then the boxes of files that my wife needs to keep for three years for her job, and then books that nobody reads anymore. ”Don’t want to throw them out, someone might want to buy them!!!!” Ugh. Really? Anyone want Dean Koontz books? Let me know I’ll cut you one hell of a deal.
I try to keep my tools and my projects in this garage. It’s just a small, one car, detached building. Barely large enough to get a car in if you wanted to, and we never have. It’s never been empty enough to fit a car in. However, we do have three bicycles, a dirt bike, scooters, skateboards, sports equipment, books, old housewares, unsold yard sale crap and more. Oh, did I mention, I have tools out there? No? Well, I remember putting them out there once long ago, but having not seen them for the last full year, it leads me to believe they have to be buried and in some early stage of fossilization.
I don’t ask for too much, I don’t think. I want my beer, my football on Sundays, some good BBQ (I’m a helluva bbq chef, check out my other site www.blackeyedpigz.com sometime) and my garage. That’s it. I need some Gutmeister space where I’m free to drink, and fart, and play with power tools. I do have a corner carved out of the mountain of family “heirlooms” where I can get to my woodworking lathe though. I make pens and wine stoppers occasionally. And it’s good.
But at this point, I’m much like one of those people you see on Hoarders. Only in reverse. It’s not my shit I want to keep on hand. It’s everyone else’s that I would throw out in a heartbeat, but I’m forced to store it and climb over it and bumble around it because “Well, we might need it.” You know how you see on those Hoarding shows where the person is in love, physically and emotionally attached to every creepy, moldy piece of consumer garbage they’ve acquired over the decades? They truly don’t see a problem and they want to keep it all because it’s like losing a limb to them? A moldy, musty, plague infected limb, but dammit, they love that limb. Well, take the crazy person out of that show, put someone with an avowed OCD fear of germs like Howie Mandel in there and force him to live in it. Now you’ve got the idea. In this scenario, I’m Howie (but not the creepy, bald, maybe-gay, maybe-straight parts) and my garage is like Hoarder House #7.
Anyone have a need for 4 or 5 dozen Disney Around-The-World adventure books? A stuffed Pokemon collection? An old shelf, perhaps? I’ve got it all. Come on down to Crazy Gutmeister’s Hoarders Home Center today!
