There was one way in and one way out. God help me if there was a fire, only a snake could escape intact. I’m sure I would’ve tripped over something if I had to run out in a panic. The walls were stacked and stabbed with random nails to hold whatever I could stick there and balance on it. I liked how that upside down bear coffee table looked on the wall. There wasn’t anywhere else to put it. Why not stick it on the wall? That’s when I admitted I was a hoarder.

I’m talking about stuff. My stuff. I’ve had a lot of stuff. I still got a lot of stuff. I use to love buying weird objects and sticking them all around my apartment. Family members would die or move and I would inherit more priceless objects soaked in nostalgia. I was always saving them for “my house”, the inevitable house that I was sure to have one day. That day hasn’t arrived yet and I’m not sure it ever will. If it does, I still have enough crap to decorate it in two shakes of a dog’s tail.

Hoarding came to mind when a friend was cleaning out his man cave and brought me some speakers he was getting rid of. I WAS READY TO ROCK!- well, almost, when we went to crank’em up, they were blown. He didn’t know they didn’t work, its the thought that counts, right? He has a lot of electronic equipment. Most of it is the audio / visual variety. He has strange giant cassettes the size of a hardback Gone with the Wind novel, down to itty-bitty, spy-sized ones. If you looking for an obscure, gold-plated mini-disc manufactured in Indonesia in 1982, just ask him, I’m sure he has it. I always thought of these electronics as his “collection” until I mentioned his speaker gift to a friend. That’s when she pointed out, “He’s a hoarder.”Pot-kettle. She knows a hoarder when she sees or hears about one. That’s because she is too. Her hoarding is more pleasing to the eye. Mainly she collects paintings, but can’t resist a foot and half wide book about cutlery if she happens to see one. Mind you, she does make a living re-selling stuff. Most of the time she transforms them into modern, usable objects. Her Midas Touch casts a spell over forgotten objects and turns the trash into treasure. She has hacked and modified her genetic hoarder code and is able to let go and monetize her stuff. Isn’t that the a key difference though? Knowing when and being able to let go of one’s possessions, rather than being consumed by ones own consumerism?

I was helping another friend of mine clean out her space. She’s a bit more extreme, and committed to her hoard. Boxes stacked to the ceiling with the odd hanging rack reaching out for air. It had been categorized into future projects and rare, possibly expensive items, mixed with the odd bits of, “Stuff you just can’t throw away!”. She had to keep most of it, because no one was willing to pay for it what it is worth. I mostly agreed with her. To be fair, she used to sell at the market too. But where was this elusive customer who would buy all of our treasure? No one ever arrived with the stack of money we deemed it was worth.

Minimalism is against my religion. (Does that sentence make sense? I often heard people say “Such and such is against my religion.”, when I was growing up.) Anyhoo -let me go back and declutter my sloven start. Minimalism sure is a long, bumpy word to boast such a sleek definition. Just look at it. Minimalism. It hardly looks minimal to me. That’s far too many letters for one word. All those letters make it a contradiction in terms. CLEAN IT UP MINAMALISM! Sure, it would be fantastic if could live on a round rug, in a room with a lamp and one bowl. But I know I’d ruin it the moment I took off my shoes. It would become an instant mess. As I look around my disheveled apartment now, I can barely see where one pile ends and another begins. I can’t see the mess, because all of it is a mess. I justify this by thinking of myself as creative type. I find order in chaos. I could tell you where most anything is if you asked for it. Honestly, I would rather stare at a wall of paintings hung salon style, rather than a single empty frame. Give me wall of empty frames. I can dream and imagine all the artwork that should have been there. Maybe I’m a minimalist at heart since I left the paintings out?

I read that one in four people are hoarders. They attribute our affliction to OCD and attention-deficit disorder. I can see why they would say that. As I sit here and type, I looked over my stacked desk to the sunflower seeds I planted and thought- “pretty-pretty”- then remembered, oh wait, I’m writing here… Exactly. If I was sitting in a sterile room though, I wonder – would I be as inspired? For example, there is a ram bookend on my desk. Its something I bought for the room I used to Air-BNB. Looking at it floods my mind with memories of all the travelers who stayed in there. There was that cute couple from Greece that were so nice to my face, then left me a shitty review, or that lesbian from Russia who married a gay friend of hers in order to avoid harassment. I also remember those stinky English guys who got so high, they could barely crawl out the door. The bookend is the catalyst. It triggers the time-machine in my brain and sends it on a roller coaster of memories. If my desk was clean, I wouldn’t’ have seen it and remembered the guest who asked if it was alright if he brought a hooker over.

Of course I said yes.

Marie Kwando ain’t welcome here. I treasure my memories. They, in themselves, are priceless. I’ve lost a lot of my hoarding ambition. Its not possible to keep everything since I never fulfilled the dream of a house, with a barn and two storage units. Random, unpacked boxes take up a lot of room and certainly aren’t pleasing to the eye. I’ve also noticed sometimes the objects I keep are linked to a unhealthy attachments to my past. I must not be done working that one through just yet. Most of them represent happy memories. There’s the swirly, glass paperweight that signals my grandmothers smile. Also, that cast iron planter makes me think of anniversaries in days gone by. It’s the kind of person I am. If I want sparse, I’ll go visit a Guggenheim Museum. If vacant is sounds appealing, I’ll look up an ex-boyfriend on Facebook. I’d rather go visit a room with several rugs lain over each other, even if its a trip-hazard. I’m the scattered crumbs in the rugs that won’t vacuum up. Some of them are too dried up to eat, but there’s a few that would still be tasty and provide sustenance. I realized a long time ago that life’s crumbs can be a delightful disarray. Sometimes they taste better to me when pressed together with fingers, rather than politely using a fork. .