Here is one of the pieces from the book:

I worked at a storage facility for a year
and it taught me everything about disposing of pictures
and everything else that doesn't matter anymore.
It didn't take working there to make me do that,
I was already in the habit of trashing pictures from my childhood.
Every year that passes I take another three or another dozen
and I put them in the garbage. 
I've gotten rid of about 25 years of my life in pictures;
After that
the hard-copy photos were no longer a thing.
Now all I have to do is click on a command
and then I empty a recycle bin.
I still have moments when I stop think about what I'm doing.
          I'm performing a Black Mass against family and keepsakes.
It's a black Mass when I drop a Hallmark Card into a bag of cigarette butts
and various wrappers,
letting it soak in trash water
and turn into paper soup.
This has been in my life for a while
But it took working at the storage to make me lose my guilt.
Shrinking that part of my brain is what every year is all about.
At the storage facility I've thrown entire family histories into a dumpster 
because the renters didn't pay their bills
and they never showed up
to collect what the auction scavengers didn't want.
I've grabbed up people's X-rays from car crashes
saved for potential court settlements that never came through.
I've made garbage out of Black & White photography of hero soldiers,
all of it artfully developed and bordered.
And those faces I threw away
they were men who charred human flesh to get back home,
they tore off their own fingernails digging their way up a hillside
in some god forsaken Asian nowhere,
all to spawn a delinquent customer
at Uncle Bob's.

I own the private library of the first child in a family to ever graduate college.
Her father swore he would be back and that touched my heart. 
I stopped yawning at my desk and tried to help him.
Almost nobody comes back for the family scrapbook or, of all things, 
books made for reading. Most     customers of Self Storage have already said fuck-it to everything.
He just wanted her college books because he was so very proud of her.
He didn't even need to pay the tab
because no one wants gym pants and books at an auction.
I thought I was doing something real charitable.
I put him in touch with the guy who had bought out his unit 
for the washer and dryer stored inside of it.
And the father, with the eyes beaming full or pride for his exceptional daughter, never came back.
I ended up calling lady friends asking if they had a use for various purses, 
what size shoe they were,     
before I started hauling her material life to the dumpster.
I guess I should say thanks for the Kurt Vonnegut books
and the red gym bag that looks vintage but isn't.

People are very proud of you
until traffic
or something else.

I've sat down to lunch with three generations of cremated human remains.
The totality of human lives
tucked into plastic bags and
placed into white cardboard boxes.
Three boxes sitting on my desk in the Manager's Office.
These people were African Americans
auctioned off in a storage unit
and I didn't fail to see the irony in that.
I ate my Cup of Noodle while reading the death bed letter of the grandmother
saying what a sorry bitch she had been.
She said
Keep clean, 
stay in school, 
hold your head up high
and keep your faith in Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior –
Even though we have this poison
that runs deep
“and I see it in your face when you get angry.”
My co-worker took all of those ashes home after a while
once nobody would notice
to play with them. To make terrible post-modern art.
Eventually nobody loves you.
Somebody looks at your dandruff
and thinks “That's a shame”
before scooping it into fire
or the debris pile.
Smart, attractive, and compassionate people 
mutate down the stream into vulgar, desperate, and mean, and you are no longer loved.
You're just the click-clack in DNA
they won't even understand.

The pounds of photography that people used to make
aren't any sort of treasure. Burn it.
All of it is a burden, not relevant history.
If it doesn't tell something hard then it goes in the trash
just like family wealth is traded off for cash and travel. 
Forget the family farm,
take a trip to Costa Rica and be a whore with the locals for a few months.

But so what,
The garbage is perfectly OK,
because people should remember the Zoo with their noses
and not with their cell phones.
They should remember with their brains
the way an elephant foot sounds landing on concrete.
If you're not paying attention then 
you can't remember it with a collection of crystal alligator figurines
or custom framed digital prints.

I just don't wait anymore.
I don't let my closet get packed full.
I'll never have anything other than a rehearsal space,
tools, or a car in the garage I might own one day.
I don't wait because I don't feel the guilt anymore.

I don't need forty pictures of myself at age five.
   I need one grainy old photograph
developed in discontinued chemical
that can at least say
“this is where your cheek bones come from.”
I don't need the letters of stories I already know and don't want to tell.
I don't want my old work
made with shaky hands covered in birthing fluid.

Though I wish my mom had known the difference between this 
and all of those antique Christmas ornaments
when she stopped celebrating
both me
and the holiday
for a little while.
Those were things for the activity we call “family.”
They weren't just plastic or porcelain, but things that moved around, 
wobbled on a dying tree, and reflected old laughter back to us from ages ago.
Sometimes it's just too soon even if the future is a waste bin. 
It can be like suicide if you're not doing it right.
Sometimes it punches me in the throat and I'm left standing there like, yeah, 
I know it's dreadful, but don't you see me choking?
I wish I still had the tree angel from the 1950s,
The one I had restored since the time I could do more than hold a crayon
 and misspell my name on the wall. It's gone.
That angel taught me something real. It taught me the joy of taking things
 all but destroyed and     
bringing them to a place more beautiful than if they were new, 
with their stitches and spots of glue. 
That angel was a fortune telling device about my future soul and now it's gone.
Then there was the pewter snowflake, hung on a tassel of gold strings,
that held a picture of me sitting beside a fake fire place at a mall. It's gone.
My favorite, aside from the angel, was the old wooden Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. 
It was delicately hand painted and touched with small spots of felt. It's gone.

And my guilt is gone. 
I bet someday the guilt will come back.
I'll look for a moment to run my fingers across something that tells me how small I used to be
and I won't find it.
No more Yak-Back child's recording device I kept inside of an old lunch box. 
Every two years I would record short messages to my future self on that thing. 
That battery never failed, was never replaced.
Somewhere in a landfill a piece of table
or a rusty wrench
will fall over onto the playback button
and it'll just keep repeating 
“December, 2007, you're in love.”
I'll have been an awkward giant
all along.
A browbeaten king of bullshit forever.
But it could be that I can hold them in my static
and keep myself to one suitcase.
I could keep them out of the mud
and embalm them in my mind
until in a flash
so anticipated and long awaited
brighter than an atomic bomb
they all disperse.