michael8rown.com

Here’s the deal: I’m a clutterbug. No matter where you go in my house, you’ll probably find a pile of something. It’s mostly piles of paper (drawings, notes, receipts, etc.), but you’ll also find cables, CDs, various pieces of musical equipment, batteries, pencils, pens, camera equipment, and books (yeah, there are a lot of book piles, too). But mostly it’s detritus that I just haven’t brought myself to throw out yet. I go through these sorts of Thoreauesque periods of wanting to trash everything, to simply my life and keep only the essentials; in other words, I just want to grab handfuls of junk and throw it all away. No, don’t even look at it, just throw it the fuck away! But I always end up asking myself, “What if there’s something important in there?” Well, the reasonable response to that would be to sort my crap into important vs. non-important items, which would probably eliminate fully three-quarters of the clutter in my house, but this task is so daunting (yeah, there’s that much crap) that I’m often paralyzed before I even begin.

But it occurs to me that it’s time to change my ways. I can’t take it anymore. And poor Alison, for as much time as she spends at my house she has been obscenely patient with my clutter. Her house is wonderfully clutter-free; in contrast my house is a sty. And I know it bugs her. Hell, it even bugs me! But I guess I’m just so used to living with it that I don’t see it anymore, I’ve been able to tune it out, so to speak. My room when I was a kid was always trashed. I hardly ever saw the carpet because there was always so much junk everywhere. I’ve gotten a lot better over the years but I still have a tendency to hang on to things, thinking, “I might need this someday.”

But I made an important first step in overcoming my clutter addiction today. I cleared out all evidence of oddfellow from chatterwaul.com. I was surprised by how many files there were with names like test.html, test2.html, test3.html, new.html, new.wait.html, this-might-be-important-someday.html, DONT-FUCKING-DELETE-THIS.html. It was, frankly, absurd. But I’m proud of myself: I let go of a lot of junk. Of course, there were some projects that I’ve held on to because, well, I put a lot of work into some of that stuff (like colectivo (which hasn’t been uploaded here yet but will be soon)). I’m happy to report that 15.8 MB of virtual clutter is gone forever. Be proud of me!

I guess the point of all this is that it was a lot easier than I thought it would be to throw stuff away. And although I can’t measure my progress eliminating physical clutter from my house in megabytes, I know that the difference will be noticeable. I’m hoping I can channel the same bravery I used in cleaning out my virtual space to cleaning out my physical space. Tonight, I’m starting with the storeroom. I plan to fill up my trash bin.

Wish me luck.