While far from spartan, I am a minimalist in many regards. I don't go in for conspicuous consumption. This isn't a conscious decision to battle our country's (admittedly raging) affluenza; it's just a question of personal taste. I have a bed to sleep in, a cheap stereo to play music on, a dependable car to drive, a computer to write at, clothes to wear… and damn little else. Books are the only thing I buy with any regularity. I don't buy souvenirs, and I don't gather accretions of crap. And yet…

When people give things to me, it means a lot. Especially if they're weird and particular things. I'm not talking so much about Xmas presents here… but the spontaneous gifts.

My favorite gifts are still the non-material ones. I've had several poems written about me (that comes from falling madly in love with poets) and one song (which I still think, as objectively as possible, is an absolutely kick-ass song). Those are great things-- they tell me that I made a good impact on someone's life (and if I have a broad goal in life, that's it).

I do have some specific physical things, though, which go with me everywhere, which provide me comfort and touchstones. At the old house I had them on the windowsill by my bed; here, I have them on the sill above my computer.

There's the stuffed pterodactyl Leigh gave me (in honor of my morning pterodactyl noises, of course; and Meg thinks my singing is annoying!);

There's the statue of Ganesha D. gave me after I finished writing The Genius of Deceit;

A pumpkin-bomb from our production of "Syllogism," a long performance art piece that I co-wrote and performed in during college;

A rum bottle (of the little, airplane-bottle variety) containing the rolled-up poem "Treasure" that Aubrey Derryberry wrote for me;

The lizard jar Blah gave me last year-- it's a jar, painted blue with clouds and green lizards. The lizards have red capes with stars on them. That jar means the earth to me;

There's Stoph, my stuffed ferret, who I may have actually bought for myself in dim antiquity-- but all the associations are with my housemates, Brian and Josh and D. and even Tony;

The dinosaur-ball from Clarion, specifically from J. when he did his 3 a.m.-Santa-Claus thing;

A small wooden boat that Scott brought me from Europe (though that's usually carried in my bookbag, because one never knows when one will require a small wooden boat);

And most recently, Meg sent me a glow-in-the-dark scorpion. It lives on my desk, now, one pincer perpetually upraised.

This is the stuff I would save if my house caught fire, the irreplaceable things (of course, I have off-site backups for all my writing, or I'd grab that, too). I'm obviously a very sentimental person; I've never pretended otherwise. And yet, sometimes it amazes even me how much just touching this stuff, just looking at it, can soothe me when I'm feeling all brambles and acid inside. Not because it reminds me of "better times"-- I'm living the best days of my life, and have been for some time, and hope to be doing so for a long time to come. No, it's more that they remind me that my life has not gone unnoticed. Oh, it's not that the people who gave me these things meant them to stand for their love, or even that they expected them to have any effect on me; some of them were very whimsical, off-the-cuff gifts. But these are the mementos in my memory-palace, they open up vistas, they remind me of parties and languid mornings in bed and crouching on woodland trails and bursting from my room excited over some story I'd written, they take me back to moments on stage and moments in front yards, to times exuberant and sublime. They keep it all connected for me; they remind me that everything I am comes from the people I've known and the places I've been. They remind me that, occasional evidence to the contrary, life is good.

Life is good.

That's worth building an altar to.