I am purging my life of a lot of old things. Antique things, like an old, watercolor painting with a hand-lettered sentiment on it: I think of you when evening shadows fall. It's either charming or creepy, depending. A bit of both. Vintage things, like a wacky 1950s Italian ashtray (see photo, it's fantastico, no? si?)  that Grandma used to keep front and center on her bric-a-brac shelf. Vintage clothes - a velvet dancing dress, a brocade two-piece ensemble - you mean clothes from dead people, my mother used to say, which now that she's, well, gone, has a weightier ring to it.  And it's making me think about the nature of things.

I'm sorry I keep going on intellectual tangents, dear readers. But the nature of things these days, for me, is all over the map. There's the totally amazing pre-fab show at the Museum of Modern Art, Home Delivery, which features remarkable prefabricated houses set up in a vacant lot. One, the Burst House, is especially terrific (thanks, as usual, to the smarties at treehugger): a jigsaw puzzle you can fit together and live in. Of course, a main tenet of the show is that prefab is not actually a new concept at all. If there are any new concepts at all. Hmm... Didn't Leonardo da Vinci actually think of the iPhone first?

If I had my prefab way, I might indulge in a Modern Cabana, built by the San-Francisco-based firm of the same name. These are really, really attractive modern boxes - "accessory buildings" - for modern-loving folks with an extra $15,000 to burn. According to a carpenter friend, you could build one of these for about $3,000. "It's just a box," he said. "With some oversized windows. Duh." To which I said, with old-fashioned bluntness, "then build it for me, ok? Duh."

Duh, indeed. I am forever straddling the Ausable Chasm between old and new. I am sorely tempted by the 50% off sale at Brocade Home, which makes their fussy-modern furniture (that bridges the old and new in such a clever, lavender-silver kind of way) actually affordable. And then there's continuing obsession with the cheap, flimsy retro-modern furniture available at Urban Outfitters, such as this chair I can't stop thinking about, which would go perfectly in my imaginary tomato-red and-charcoal grey writing studio, when it's ever built. It's upholstered and button-tufted, for crying out loud, and only $200. Practically retro in price. So it's probably made in a factory in Bangladesh by children. But really, aside from that, what's not to like?

Then last night, I found myself sitting in a booth in Ninety-Nine Pub and Restaurant, a franchise "American casual dining experience"  in Kingston, staring around the room at all the fake old plaques and distressed objects painted various shades of mustard that count as "atmosphere-enhancing decor" according to a press release on the company that runs the franchise. They even have auctions  of their nostalgic plaques before "refreshing" the restaurants. Sitting in an orange-colored puddle on a fake old plate in front of me was a New England lobster roll. The lobster tasted like paste and had the consistency of something indecent, but it was comforting nonetheless. It was the image I was after. That's why I ordered it, to trigger a happy memory:  the good old days at the lobster house in Cape Cod, with someone I'm now at war with.

Suggestive schlock that triggers nostalgia. Schlockstalgia! That's what the decorator-consultants hired to fill the franchises with fake old advertisements and strangely off examples of kitsch are going for. Hey: doesn't that Great American Outhouse tin sign just fill you with a sense of the ole past?  I finished my lobster roll, my sweetened iced tea, paid the bill with old-fashioned cash, and went home to try and sell more stuff on ebay.

Jana Martin is getting on with ousting old stuff. Her blog, Making Room, runs every week in the MOLI View's Fashion