Housekeeping Note:
The Problem
If I seem to have been shirking my duties lately, it’s for a very good reason — but also a very boring one. Perhaps the most boring one. I’ve been getting my house in order, literally.
Don’t ask me why it took this look to see the light, but, talking things over with Kathleen in St Croix, I realized that I could no longer coexist with miscellaneous piles, bags, and other accretions of stuff in an already overfurnished apartment. It was clear that I need to live in a world where “catching up” is as uncommon as a triple bypass.
Not just catching up, then, but trying to obviate future catchings-up is what I’ve been up to. The going is very slow. (And the side effects! My mind set to Drudge, I’ve read little and written less.) But my working principle is to deal with each item on the list until it no longer exists. Until the contents of the bag or pile have either found a permanent home in one of my smallish rooms or been discarded.
That is so much easier said than done!
For example: there’s a quaint basket that’s full of photo albums. Not all the photo albums, mind you. Our wedding pictures are kept separately, and two albums of my favorite law school photographs (one black-and-white, one color) may be found, side by side, in the interstice between a bookshelf and a structural element in the bedroom — where they just fit. And the vast bulk of our photographs are housed in “shoeboxes” (actually pricier storage boxes from Exposures) and stacked in a purpose-built unit (also from Exposures) that reaches almost to the ceiling. The albums in the basket are truly miscellaneous. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them — especially the ones that I just inherited from my late stepmother. My inclination is to digitize the lot and toss the prints. But I don’t have one of those neat scanners yet.
And that’s just one problem. Two items on the list are heaps of magazines. Thinking about them makes me break out in the moral equivalent of hives. This afternoon, I went through a pile of Saveurs. I clipped very little, and what I clipped I put in a manila folder that I will purge in a couple of months. The recipes that I haven’t used will go down the dumper. That’s the theory, anyway. Mind you, the Saveurs weren’t even on my list, because the magazines weren’t in a bag. They formed a stack on the sofa, shown above. (The sofa, that is; I took the picture after the culling.)
By now, regular readers will by shaking their heads slowly: I sound just like someone who has sworn off drink — for the umpteenth time. And what arrests me is not that I’m promising yet again to keep up with the influx of printed matter. It’s that I believe, in some rock-ribbed way, that I owe you an explanation for what I’ve been doing, instead of writing up books and concerts and whatnot.
Or perhaps it’s just that I don’t want anyone to think that I’ve been out having fun. One thing is clear, though: I blog about The Problem in good faith. It may be boring, but I don’t know a soul who doesn’t face the same Collyer-esque nightmare. There’s something about the way we live now, some side-effect of our best intentions, that generates unmanageable middens of information. We live in The Information Age, after all! No one has ever had to cope with such pressures. It seems almost ungracious, if one is at all historically-minded, to complain about a vexation that does not involve death or dismemberment. Hey, I’m not complaining!
I’m just wondering if LXIV was right, this afternoon, when he saw Hedge Funds for Dummies in one of my book piles. He said that I can throw it away now.
I am rigorous about throwing ‘stuff’ out and if we get a few extra days thrown in over the holidays (in lieu of bonus) my hall closet is going to get a serious once-over.
If I haven’t touched it for a year it has to go. Simple. No magazine pile up. I used to get Tennis and Golf Digest in addition to SI, but no longer. Architectural Digest : no more. Vanity Fair, the Economist, SI, and Out. And of course The New Yorker…..
A great friend from New Orleans moved north in the 70s and a bunch of us went over to help him unpack the moving van. As he and I struggled up 4 flights of stairs I asked what in the world weighed so much. He did not answer me. So, I opened the box and found old Times-Picayunes which he had not read but “was going to.’ A previous box I lugged up had National Geographics which he hadn’t gotten around to……I always remember that when cleaning….and of course yelling at him, dear sweet man that he was.
Reading your entry and Fossil’s post put me into the moral equivalent of a panic attack. What a waste of our life’s time and energy. I set aside to do some clutter management today. I have been up since 5:30 and I wait, like one might for a morning bowel movement, for the inspiration to dig in. Without it, I can’t make myself do it. And then I hate every moment of it. Sigh. You are so right that we are all so plagued, and I for one appreciate your revealing your thoughts and processes for handling it. I have two fantasies that get stirred up whenever this topic arises: 1.) a fire burns everything down and takes it all away (of course, it starts accumulating the very next day, starting with the insurance paper flow), and 2.) escaping to an off-the-grid undisclosed remote location, preferably in rural France, and quitting modern life all together.
You have my deepest sympathies. I am actually in the process of trying to rid my existence of much extranious acretion as well. It has dawned on me that about 75% of the things in my apartment have no earthly use to me and need to either go off to new homes, to charity or head off to the dumpster.