Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Clutter



My mother brought me Xenias in a little plastic Diet Coke bottle on Sunday.  They sit before me as I write.  Pretty little flowers, deep, purplish red and another that is yellow.  They are small, though, and everything in the room distracts from them.  Detracts.  They should sit alone in a bare room, the sole focus of attention.

I am often distracted.  Oft.  I need to isolate so many things.  I live in clutter.  It is time to de-clutter.  Un-clutter.

I get overwhelmed and am not good at organizing.  Things, I mean.  I can organize thoughts and words.  I am good at categorization.  Phylogeny.  Things, however. . . I never know where they go or where to put them.  Down, mostly, on something.  And then they are lost.  Not missing, of course, just lost in the jumble of things.  I no longer discern them.

They are mostly pretty things, desirable things, but then there is the random slip of paper, a receipt maybe, or a box or a plastic container.  There are lamps and candle holders and balls--I have a wicker basket full of weird balls--and vases and clocks and gifted elephant bookends and an ostrich egg.  There are piles of books and framed pictures, just snapshots of life, and the bookshelves are full of books but other things, too. An 8x10 camera on a tripod has sat in my bedroom for six month or a year without being used.  The drawers are full.  I have stacks of pretty coasters that somehow I never use.  Book bags and backpacks and camera bags.

I could go on.

I had bad dreams last night.  Not nightmares, I guess, but I'm not certain where the dividing line is between them.  Bad dreams.  I woke and thought about them and realized I was trying to work something out, and that I had worked it out, at least in my head if not in life.  It is the mind's way of cleaning up the clutter, of organizing the mess.

I guess.

I look across the room into a corner where a clay pot with rattan wrapping holds a bunch of pussy willow branches.  I have had them for--Jesus--maybe twenty-five years.  At least half of the white balls on them are missing.  I don't know that I could throw them away.  They must mean something to me, an extant memory. . . .  They are ragtag now, and I should let them go.  Would I miss them?  It seems to me that I would.

A garage is a shitty museum.  Attics, too.

I might sleep better if I cleaned mine out.

No sun this grey and drizzly morning.  I can no longer linger here.  I must go.

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