Sans Fig Leaf

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"Clutters"

23 November, 2002

I didn't have "Clean computer desk" on my to-do list this weekend.

It was the first time in six weeks that it wasn't there. I didn't put it on the list because I never seem to get around to it, or if I start, I don't finish. I decided to keep this weekend's list short and realistic.

Apparently the mood just had to be right, because Friday night I just started doing it. And I kept plugging away at it until I got so drowsy, I has having trouble keeping my eyes open.

One of the problems is I'm a packrat--son of packrats, grandson of packrats, and great-grandson of packrats.

It's hard to explain the packrat mentality to people who aren't packrats themselves. When I was a kid, my mom placed the blame on the depression -- both of her parents had been teens during the depression and it left them ever cautious about the possibility of having to get by for a long time with little or no money.

Except that her grandmother (my great-grandmother), blamed it on the civil war. My great-grandmother's grandmother had had to feed a huge family during the war while grandpa was off at war. "She really knew how to stretch a penny," my great-grandmother would say, and talk about how she saved all sorts of things and later turned them into items they needed around the house.

I think it's a dodge. Some of us are inclined to save things that we may need again later. We learn the habit as kids and it stays with us. When, through the never-ending cycles of history, bad times befall our community, we are already in the habit of saving things and making do. The bad times just give us an excuse to brag about it. And then a handy bit of validation for the next generation or so.

The packrat programming is strong. As I wass carrying piles of papers and things pulled from compartments of my desk, I found some of the silliest things: cleaners designed for the rubber platens of dot matrix/daisy-wheel printers, grocery lists from who knows when, cryptic notes, passwords for on-line services that don't even exist anymore, not to mentions scores of badly labeled floppy discs.

No matter how old or obsolete something was, there was a strong emotional resistance to the idea of throwing it away. It was like I was arguing with a stubborn child. And a clever one, too. More than once I would decide to throw something away, and as I walked toward the trashcan, I would suddenly think of something important that I should do or check on right away. Which is probably why I seldom finish the desk-cleaning task when I start it.

There are advantages to the packrat mentality. There has been more than one time in my life when some appliance or other has broken down, right when we needed it for a big dinner or something, and I was able to go dig a spare out of a closet or from the basement, so we could get on with things without serious interruption.

But there's always all this stuff squirreled away all over the house. It makes finding things difficult. Moving is always a nightmare. So I have been making a concerted effort to fight my inner packrat. I go through things and we throw stuff away. When we buy something new to replace an older gadget or piece of furniture or whatever, I try to give the old away to someone who needs it, or get rid of it.

And it never gets easier. No matter how many times I've gotten rid of things, no matter how much better I feel after cleaning out a closet and turning it from a jumble to a useful storage area, the next time I still hear my grandmother's voice scolding me, "You might need that some day!"

I am resolved to keep fighting the packrat urge. I know I will always have lots of stuff. I couldn't live without a personal library, for one thing.

Occasionally I have the unexpected pleasure of rediscovering something I had forgotten about. Last night it was a simply atrocious poem that I wrote when I was about 21 years old. It is bad in so many, many ways. It wasn't, thank the goddess, a poem about my personal angst. It was supposed to be a song written by a fictitious character in one of my stories. So it was full of his angst, rather than my own. But the metre was horrid, the theme trite, and it was terribly pretentious.

And I hesitated a long time before tossing it into the recycle. I knew that there were other copies out there. It had been published in a fanzine, and in accordance with the laws of such things, some day at a particularly embarassing moment it will surface again. But this was the first typed version of the poem, so I felt a slight reluctance to toss it out, because maybe someone would want it. I decided that that was just more pretension and a good reason to give it the heave, when I thought that maybe I should hang onto it for myself, as an object lesson in how much I have improved over the last couple of decades.

He almost had me. I almost didn't recognize the inner packrat whispering this suggestion. I started to place the piece of paper over in a pile to file away.

But I didn't. Examples of my old writing turn up from time to time, so I will get plenty of reminders in the future that writing is a perpetual learning experience.

It went into the recycle. Hours later, as I sat at my desk able to see most of the top surface for the first time in ages, and able to tell which documents are in the cubbies, I was very happy that I resisted the packrat.