I’m one of those people who simply aren’t bothered about mess.
Please - don’t get me wrong, I’m not big on dirty messes I’m just absolutely nonplussed by clutter.
My house is teeming with teetering towers of useless nothingness.
Letters that should be filed, books that should be returned to the library or put back on shelves, piles of CD’s, tools and well just, ’stuff’ really.
It seems, when you look around my house, that if there’s a horizontal surface somewhere that’s not already covered with ‘stuff’ it will only be a small matter of time before it too falls prey to my bad habits. Truth be told there is not very many of these rare surfaces to be found. It’s getting to the point of ridiculousness.
Several days ago I caught myself muttering profanities because on three separate occasions I found the need to move a pile of stuff I had stacked on top of the rubbish bin lid!
Come on Daryl, help yourself out here a little.
I began to look rather enviously at the floor as being a greatly underutilized horizontal storage area. I reasoned that piles that fell over from the floor position are already on the floor and would be far less alarming than the piles that crash to the floor from the dining room table in the dead of night and frighten the bejesus out of me. But having kicked a twenty kilogram dumbbell with my foot, tripped over a pile of books and cracked my eye socket into a half open door during a midnight toilet run I have decided to err on the side of caution with regards to the floor storage system.
I took it upon myself last week to attempt a tidy up. Four hours and a great deal of cuss words later I arrived at the conclusion that the piles were not in any way diminished but had simply moved to different positions around the house! To add to my frustration it was now impossible to find anything, for despite the apparent chaos that the former piles may have represented to the casual observer, I had subconsciously created a mental cataloguing system – as one does when things sit in the same place for several years at a time. Now it had become a daunting and laborious task to go through each pile in search of what it was I was looking for as opposed to; ‘third pile on the left, kitchen bay window’ or ‘second pile on the left, third pile back, top of the television cabinet’.
Good Lord! What was I thinking?
So a week later and it feels like most of the piles have found their way back to their original positions and peace has been restored to the mess that is my house.
I have decided, for better or worse to leave the mess just the way it is. Despite the dust and the occasional cobweb, at least I know where to find everything.
I have rationalized the situation down to this simple logic.
Think about it – piles are merely physical representations of lists.
Lists are how humans work.
Mess equals human nature.
Sweet, I’m off for a nap…
Daryl W.
30/03/2008
Please - don’t get me wrong, I’m not big on dirty messes I’m just absolutely nonplussed by clutter.
My house is teeming with teetering towers of useless nothingness.
Letters that should be filed, books that should be returned to the library or put back on shelves, piles of CD’s, tools and well just, ’stuff’ really.
It seems, when you look around my house, that if there’s a horizontal surface somewhere that’s not already covered with ‘stuff’ it will only be a small matter of time before it too falls prey to my bad habits. Truth be told there is not very many of these rare surfaces to be found. It’s getting to the point of ridiculousness.
Several days ago I caught myself muttering profanities because on three separate occasions I found the need to move a pile of stuff I had stacked on top of the rubbish bin lid!
Come on Daryl, help yourself out here a little.
I began to look rather enviously at the floor as being a greatly underutilized horizontal storage area. I reasoned that piles that fell over from the floor position are already on the floor and would be far less alarming than the piles that crash to the floor from the dining room table in the dead of night and frighten the bejesus out of me. But having kicked a twenty kilogram dumbbell with my foot, tripped over a pile of books and cracked my eye socket into a half open door during a midnight toilet run I have decided to err on the side of caution with regards to the floor storage system.
I took it upon myself last week to attempt a tidy up. Four hours and a great deal of cuss words later I arrived at the conclusion that the piles were not in any way diminished but had simply moved to different positions around the house! To add to my frustration it was now impossible to find anything, for despite the apparent chaos that the former piles may have represented to the casual observer, I had subconsciously created a mental cataloguing system – as one does when things sit in the same place for several years at a time. Now it had become a daunting and laborious task to go through each pile in search of what it was I was looking for as opposed to; ‘third pile on the left, kitchen bay window’ or ‘second pile on the left, third pile back, top of the television cabinet’.
Good Lord! What was I thinking?
So a week later and it feels like most of the piles have found their way back to their original positions and peace has been restored to the mess that is my house.
I have decided, for better or worse to leave the mess just the way it is. Despite the dust and the occasional cobweb, at least I know where to find everything.
I have rationalized the situation down to this simple logic.
Think about it – piles are merely physical representations of lists.
Lists are how humans work.
Mess equals human nature.
Sweet, I’m off for a nap…
Daryl W.
30/03/2008
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