Two figures of the passage of time as the accumulation of waste you keep around

Almost ten years ago to this day (couple days before my 18th birthday), I became diabetic.  Consequences of this: ate healthier, gathered far more scars via a tendency to heal terribly, end up crouched on the floor of a kitchen at midnight from time to time adrenaline-flushed and eating honey on top of jam, and these odd containers of the used, kept in boxes so I don't let sharp things loose into the landfill: pens, needles, syringes, small instruments for bleeding your fingers.  Now unsterile, purposeless, having already transferred to my guts that strangely pig-leather reeking liquid that keeps me going on and on.  They clatter in hollow clicks and weigh very little.

The passage of time measured in the auto-obsolescence of iPods, that stopped working after their warranties. A slight hint of rust around the corners of the wheel, the battery seeps out.  When I try to plug them in, there's a faint, confused image, the dead battery always mustering just enough juice to remind you that it is permanently out of itself.  The one on the right my dad gave to me, with our answer to WWJD inscribed on the back: WWND - What Would Nietzsche Do?  Smiled by myself last night when I saw this again, recalled his neat and angled handwriting on the accompanying card.  It takes the breakdown of these things to make you recall their origin (when they become personal objects, fondled and sweated with and dropped and carried) and start to miss them.  The urge to join the horde of hoarders builds, not to keep everything with you but to live with it so as to slowly recognize something as the trash that it has finally become, rather than the one that got away.