But what if it’s valuable?
The pursuit of trivial knowledge is right up there with the pursuit of happiness. That’s why I take a certain immoral pleasure in watching that tackiest of TV programs, Antique Roadshow. Seriously, where else can you see the “good” junk from someone’s attic appraised by experts? But then comes the quandary.
If you suddenly found out that one of your best-kept pieces of junk was actually valuable. One of a kind. What do you do next? If you keep it, in the bibilical sense, hidden under a bushel basket, then your treasure is just one more piece of attic fluff. If you sell it, then it’s gone. What do you do with the money? Go out and try to replace it?
You see where the difficulty arises. We are supposed to throw away the junk we accumulate (so I’m told, on a regular basis). After all, it’s junk. But, waste not, want not. If I did (let’s just say, for the sake of argument) clean out the basement, since our house doesn’t have an attic and all the junk accumulates in the lower areas, then I would return to a time when I had no junk, because what belonged to my father belonged to him.
And then along comes another episode of the Antique Roadshow. Not that i’ve seen much that resembles MY junk, since i don’t collect awful paintings, old rugs or swords that were wielded by a crazy ancestor. But what if i did trundle over with a trunkload of stuff (carefully removed from the house so that the door wouldn’t lock behind me) only to find that I had something valuable.
The answer is obvious. Don’t take risks.
