Gods of Advertising

Your father once told you possessions possess you. Nothing reminds you of this more than a storage unit, the twilight zone between heirloom and the no longer relevant. Not yet junk. At least according to Craigslist. One day your grown children might fight over the contents. In the meantime, you put it all into storage. You did this once before, when you’d moved to California. Then the extra space had only been temporary, until you found a home. This time will be longer. The house you rented for your family is smaller. It had no garage. Fewer closets. Your extraneous possessions might be locked up until the day you died or divorced, or even longer. Out of sight is out of mind.

Until recently, public storage facilities were innocuous structures, occupying real estate below bridges, by factories, in ugly places. Then, by storm, they entered popular culture by way of Reality TV. Shows like Storage Wars made each dingy locker a potential goldmine. You wonder what yours is worth, a lifetime.

To be continued…