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This whole thing started as something of an experiment: How much of my shit could I get rid of before I started to freak out? How many objects do I hold to be so precious that I simply could not, not ever, not never, live without them? As it turns out, not too many. Much to my surprise, I've managed to reduce my life to eight boxes, and they ain't terribly large boxes.

A few months back, I decided to leave New York City for a while. Hit the road, sit out this sluggish economy in a less expensive and more beautiful climate. I've got enough portable income that I can support myself anywhere in the world where I can secure a decent Internet connection once a month. A little writing, a little graphic design, you know, that kind of stuff. Maybe not enough to pay the bills around here, but in Eastern Europe?

I gave up my apartment, found new homes for the cats, a foster home for the dog, bought a one-way ticket to Somewhere Else. But what about all my crap? Like so many of me, I've been humping around 200 books, 500 CDs, 1000 records and 15 years' worth of thrift store junk that substitutes for high culture in my caste. I don't have parents nearby with an available attic or garage, and I'm not about to pay $50 a month to store these artifacts of questionable value. So fuck it. Fuck it all. Dump it. Dump it all.

I started with the CDs. Rather than selling them to a store at $2 apiece?only to then see them peddled to my friends at $8 apiece?I'd let my pals take them off my hands at five a pop. Twelve for $50. I typed up a list, e-mailed it to musically likeminded friends and quickly sold about 50. Next up, the vinyl. This is when the experiment truly began: these singles and LPs had been with me for more than 15 years, making up one of those collections that prompted friends five years my junior to drool with desire. That early Nirvana Sub Pop single? Got it. Mudhoney "Touch Me I'm Sick"? Yup. Cop Shoot Cop with pig's blood? Sure, sure. Of course, of course.

But fuck it again. Type the list. E-mail it around. Sell off a couple dozen. Raise a buck fifty.

Barring any locally made purchases wherever I'm staying, I'll be mixing and matching the same two pair of pants and four shirts for the next year. Therefore, on the chopping block: any clothing not worn in the last three weeks and anything ignored during the critical gotta-do-laundry periods. I trimmed down half my wardrobe, stashed half of the remainder for my return, donated the rest to a favorite thrift store in Queens.

What of the rest of it? My apartment was a thrift store wonderland. Grandma's furniture. Ugly paintings. Tiki masks. "Dogs Playing Poker." All that stuff that had found its way to me over the years, pop-cultural strays, forgotten and now looking for a sympathetic home.

I posted fliers all around the neighborhood. The "Hipster Apt. Sale" promised rare vinyl, zines, comics, furniture "and more!" Naturally, I put sample pictures up on a website because guys like me do that. I mass e-mailed my friends and their friends and people I have no right calling friends. Sunday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Bring cash.

At 9:01 Sunday morning, I had six people in the apartment scooping up DVDs, snatching 12 CDs at a time, buying nine LPs for $20 and singles at $2 each. By 10:30 a.m., I had 15 twenties in my pocket, which was all I'd been hoping to make for the entire day.

Noon. The vinyl guys start rolling in. Skinny Williamsburg dudes in orange-brown leather jackets, zooming right past the dollar table, instinctively swerving around the digital media, seeing not the pile of books and comics, and setting up shop at the piles of vinyl on the floor. Most crouched and flipped through. Some sat down and got comfortable. Most left with the bargain-making nine LPs, some with more, some less. One older guy stayed more than an hour, carefully examining just about every platter yet eventually buying only two?a Pet Clark and an early Sinatra?after remarking that he doesn't "buy scratches." Just what I needed: two dollars and a talking-to about how I've treated my records.

At 3 p.m., friends arrived, sixpacks in hand, charity in their hearts. They bought books they really didn't need, movies they'd seen a million times, a knickknack or two they'd admired over the years. By 4 I was making deals. Bookshelf and credenza combo. Buy a comic book, get a zine. Buy a zine, get a comic book. Want that microwave? Five bucks off if you buy the coffee table!

Youthful weekends at yard sales with my family. Countless hangover Saturdays combing the thrifts of West Philadelphia. Everything came together that Sunday, for I had thrown the motherfucker of all one-man apartment sales. By the end of the day, I had north of a grand in my pocket and enough junk in the apartment to hold a followup sale, were I so motivated. My neighbors took most of the leftovers, I donated the rest back to thrift. Dust to dust.

My entire daily life is now strapped to my back, and I've got about eight boxes of must-keep sentimentality and necessity, one bookshelf, a bag or two of clothing stored in a friend's basement. That's about seven boxes more than I'd wanted to have, but fuck it. So what if I didn't successfully tear down my material identity to its barest essentials? So what if I kept a couple dozen records? Who would've bought five Walt Wanderley albums anyway? Especially with all the scratches.