the case of the creeping crud

the handsome man and i finally broke down and bought a stereo cabinet, six months after moving into our new house. i hated to spend the money after the poop-chute debacle (and finding out we need $2,500 worth of insulation, and $1,200 of furnace repair). but i missed my music, and i was losing my tiny little mind not hearing another adult voice during the day. i needed cds. i needed npr.

so we got a lovely little number from ikea: long, low, holds the equipment and a ton of cds. we put it in the dining room so it can double as a sideboard.

and that's when it happened.

little things started to accumulate on the surface of it: mail, place mats, receipts, ipods, iphone, digital cameras, and cords, cords, cords to various techie devices. (guess what industry the handsome man works in?) this morning, the "goddamit" factor also included ear buds, ear buds case (separated, of course), and another laptop computer, which seem to breed like bunnies around here.

i knew i needed to, as my friend used to say when she was a kid, nip this in the butt.

background: my crazy great-aunt had a 3-story mansion complete with ballroom. she was the type who started at the back of a room and filled it to the door with you name it: old calendars, jars of twist ties, anything, everything. when that room was full, she closed the door and moved onto the next one. it took my weary parents untold weekends lugging out 90 garbage bags at a shot to clear that effer out.

background 2: when my grandmother was declining (aka being found wandering in a daze with light bulbs in her pockets), she moved from her largish house to a small apartment...taking everything with her. the living room looked like a furniture showroom, with sofas and armchairs lined up at attention in rows.

background 3: my mother-in-law has 30 years of gourmet magazine in her basement. 'nuff said.

that pack rat gene runs deep in the handsome man. when we moved, i had to literally stand over him as he went through his stuff to get him to throw crap out. and by "crap" i mean things like articles he cut out of popular photography 15 years ago:

me: "why are you saving those?"

him: "well...i might want to refer to them someday."

me: "have you?"

him: silence, the look

me: "you know, you seem like kind of a computer-savvy guy. there's this thing i've heard of called the internet? where you can look stuff up?"

him: silence, the look, slowly begins to throw articles away

it was the same packing up old books in the attic to donate. do we really need an airport guide from 1987? (the handsome man is also a private pilot.)

and, like his mother does, he can't just say yes or no. he has to tell me the entire provenance and history of each book: where he got it, when he got it, what it was about, if he finished it or not. I DO NOT CARE! just tell me up or down, in or out, yea or nay, does it stay or does it go?!

because here's the problem with pack-rattiness: keeping everything is the same as keeping nothing, because you are so inundated by stuff you can't find what you need or want. remove the haystack, and your odds of finding the needle are mucho better.

so i am NOT going through the creeping crud again. this house is twice as big as our old one, and i shudder to think how many mystery cords it could conceivably contain. that's why i have begun a new campaign of vigilance, which includes throwing something out every day and dumping all his little crapola in his top dresser drawer.

(hey, i could be a new cartoon superhero: look! there in the dining room! it's the tidier and her magical ever-expanding garbage bag! need to think about a sidekick now.)

epilogue: last week, i caught him cutting articles out of the most recent pop photo. beware the tidier, my pet. bewaaaaare...