I need to talk to you about your stuff. Where is it? I bet you don’t know. I bet you know where your lame stuff is, your clothes, toilet articles, shovels and rakes and that liquid that’s supposed to help you re-grow your hair. But I bet you don’t know where any of your good stuff is, like your old vinyl, those pictures of your high school girlfriend, the silver dollars your grandpa gave you, that pile of vintage Sports Illustrateds or that Davy Crockett coonskin cap you had when you were seven. You need to find a better place for your stuff, man.

Yep, the modern earthling, if he keeps it all, stores his good stuff in a cardboard box in the attic or in a crate in his mom’s basement and at the back of a concrete storage locker off of Rosecrans Avenue. It’s true that you really don’t know what you have, isn’t it? You may not have any good stuff left, and if you did, you wouldn’t know where to begin looking for it, right? You should take your stuff more seriously, like me.

What I lack in the finer things in life I more than make up for in doo-dads and knick-knacks. Twenty years ago I decided that I wanted all my good stuff around me at all times. The other guy has his old football cards in a shoebox in Pacoima, not me … Mine are on display and I see them every day. I have thirty-seven Zippo lighters, I spark one of them up every day. I have 1,038 groovy buttons, ninety-eight lapel pins from national parks, three dozen rock band patches and twenty-one concert bandanas that I gaze at in wonder whenever I walk by. This is why you have stuff, man!

“Have you ever noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?” George Carlin said that. George understands me. I could spend a lot of time talking about my stuff, about my Snoopy soapdish or my Beatles serving tray or my seventy-year-old gumball machine or the real twenty-four-carat gold I got at the Crazy Horse Memorial, but I won’t because it would sound like bragging and it would make you feel bad about yourself because your stuff’s not that good and you don’t even know where it is.

I only bring this stuff up to help you. The next time you encounter any of your good stuff put it somewhere prominent in your house where you’ll always see it. Do the same the next time and the time after that. Pretty soon you’ll have all your best stuff all around you like a pack of old friends.

Of course, after you fill every shelf and every square inch of counter space with your stuff, your wife will leave you, but that was bound to happen at some point anyway. Offer her a hearty handshake and wish her well, things may get a little lonely but shit, at least you still have your stuff.