→ You’ve Got to Make a Mess
“You’ve got to make a mess to clean a mess,” she used to say. I’d hear this as I walked into a room to see mom poring over a floor littered with old photos or business paperwork or vinyl albums. Or in the kitchen with pots and pans, cookbooks, spices, and Tupperware containers scattered across every usable space. Mom gathered a lot of miscellany over the course of time, but she was the rare breed of pack rat who are exceptionally organized. She had to be. And she went with the binge-and-purge method of de-cluttering; pull everything out and put it all back again.
As I sit here in my bedroom/office/poker lounge of awesomeness with a floor full of crap, I become aware that I have inherited a lot of those traits. The good news is that I’m organized. The bad beat is that I just have too much shit. That’s really from a lack of space though. I’m only working with one room here, and it’s functioning as my bedroom, office, workshop, darkroom, theater, linen closet, and library. It makes it difficult to keep things tidy and findable, and that only drives me crazy once in a while.
Like now.
As such, I’m right in the middle of another massive organization, and I think it might be serious this time. Unfortunately, the middle is not the most impressive stage of a massive organization. Useless shit is strewn across my room like the remnants of a natural disaster. A bad one. Among the things currently in the middle of my already-cramped floor are a suitcase, a heap of ‘i’ll-do-it-tomorrow’ laundry, a tire iron, two baseball bats (from my playing days in the big leagues), half of the clean clothes I own, no less than six pairs of shoes, a snowboard, a neck pillow, three water bottles, two bottles of vodka from Poland, and a stack of empty picture frames. And a dog. And on my desk? Another water bottle, a beer bottle, two coffee cups, a bottle of mouthwash, a CPU fan still in its box, a stack of DVD-Rs, an ashtray, three lighters, a bowl, at least a dozen notebooks, a hand drum, and a huge stack of magazines and bills. You’ve got to make a mess, right mom?
It’s all part of a work in progress though, and I think it will be my finest opus yet. I’m well on the way to re-organizing my room, and it is a microcosm of my life as I really think about it. Every few months, I become aware that my world has filled with clutter, just like dust bunnies that creep up along the floorboard. Once I know it’s there, I feel this overwhelming urge to purge all of that stuff and reduce, reuse, and recycle. The latest installment of this O.C.D. resulted from a bad day with my desk. I was looking at all the shit around my computer, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. A clean work area contributes directly to productivity for me, and I realized that I couldn’t have an organized mind with such a disorganized environment. Once I started cleaning my desk, though, I had to clean the bookshelf next to it, and that created another mess somewhere else. I’ve been chasing this cleanliness all around my room for two days now, and it’s culminated in a full-fledged fall cleaning.
Really since the start of summer, I have been on a sprawling, meandering whirlwind of a course, and my life doesn’t have time to keep up with itself. Paperwork piles up in the drawer, bills go unpaid for too long, and I start to wear clothes from the pile of laundry that I just never got around to folding. General disorder begins to set in. I must fight it. Hence I have gone to war with my environment, and so far this bloodbath is a virtual draw. We’ve both landed our blows, my latest being a huge culling of magazines and electronics that I could never get rid of before. Gone. Take that, clutter! This sort of organizational overhaul has partially spawned this website, too, as I look for a place to quantify my thoughts and dealings.
You’ve got to make a mess to clean a mess.