I AM HAPPIER AT THE DUMP THAN I AM AT THE MALL. I get more joy out of tossing things out than I do from shopping. It’s amazing the amount of downsizing I have done in the last month. I’m calling it the Great Purge of 2015. There’s a scene in “Moby Dick” that comes to mind. I’d quote it exactly, but I’d have to reread the book, so I’ll paraphrase.

Melville’s story can be read as a life metaphor. We are sailors. The ships are our bodies. The sea is life. Whales are meanings and ideas. We seek them perpetually to distill their oil and bring us light. Ahab wanted it all. He wanted to harness immortality, and it harnessed him.

Melville describes a scene after a crew has killed a whale and lashed it to the side of their ship. The sea is too choppy for rendering blubber. Now the ship was listing to one side and the crew had to make constant compensations to keep from floating in circles. The captain ordered his men to quickly hunt and kill a second whale. They did so and lashed it to the other side. Now the ship was balanced again and tacking straight ahead, but it was dragging in the choppy water and wave upon wave splashed the deck and threatened the men. All that weight and bulk made progress slow and tedious.

Melville’s solution, spoken through Ishmael his main character, was to cut away both whales, lighten your load, and sail away, skimming burden free and easy across the surface of the waves. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s how it feels.

I recently wrote about my burden of dreams. Now it is time for my dream of burdens, and their unloading. I’m typing in a virtually empty den. My computer desk and chair are by the window, separated by two house plants. That’s it. The freshly painted green walls are bare. The closet is empty. When it was a teacher’s study, it was jam-packed with whales.

I put the whales in the garage, hoping to distill their bulk into precious oil and perhaps some ambergris. Only ambergris and oil would be allowed back into my den.

First to go was about 200 cassette tapes. They represented that entire era, all my music and mixes. With a clack and clatter, I filled a recycle bin to over flowing. I had long ago distilled the music onto digital files. My vinyl got moved to Yerington Storage years ago.

Next to be purged — please don’t gasp — were all my books. The novels will be recycled or stored in Nevada, but they are not coming back upstairs. I’ve already read them. Their contents are distilled into my Kindle. Reference books will be called up for duty as needed. I mounted six shelves in the closet; each is two feet wide. They’ve got to hold everything I bring into the room, so book space is severely limited.

Currently the only books on my den shelf deal with jokes, cartoons, poker, blackjack, pinball machines, smoking meat, craft beer, and a few cookbooks. Honestly, I could buy the digital versions of all of them as well, and if space grows dear I shall.

My toughest accomplishment was my tie and shirt purge. The ties were easy. “Bye, ties!” and they were gone. I kept 10. The shirts I suffered over. No way to distill them. Digital photos would be dorky.

I sat all day in the garage examining each one. You see, I collect T-shirts. I’ve been buying funny T-shirts since I was a teenager. Whenever I traveled, instead of a refrigerator magnet or spoon, I’d buy a T-shirt. Every shirt I own tells a story.

However, it was a collection I couldn’t wear or share satisfactorily, so I put 74 shirts in the discard pile. Ouch.

“Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.”

If I trucked them to Nevada, I’d never see them anyhow, and they’d get old and smelly, so I decided to Goodwill them. Four garbage bags got stacked in the corner for early departure. It was my darkest day, or maybe it was just evening.

Then! Then, oh, happy night, or serendipity, you came to visit, and made me joyful again. While climbing into bed, I opened the recent Rolling Stone magazine and decided to read it from back to front. No reason why.

What did I find in the back where they stuff all the low-priced advertisements? I found an ad for a company in Kentucky called Campusquilts.com. Their strap line reads: “If you are like most people, you have a pile of treasured old T-shirts you just can’t bear to throw away.”

Campusquilts will take your favorite shirts and knit you a tote or a pillow or a lap quilt all the way up to king-sized quilts. I could always use another queen-size quilt, and it required only 42 shirts and $370.

With glee in my heart, I spent my morning rescuing my dearly beloveds. They’re now in the mail, speeding their way to a distillery in Kentucky. I’ll share a picture in about a month.

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.