Production Junction, What's Your Function?

Today marked the end of the “messy” phase of my year that began maybe nine or ten months ago. Back then I moved my computer out of the spare room and placed it, quite controversially, in the living room and squarely in front of the large plasma television that my mother purchased for me at Christmas, 2006. Showing my gift for rationalization, I thought I would be more productive if I had the distraction of hundreds of overpriced cable television channels, and so I abandoned my ersatz office and turned it into a temporary “storage” area.

“Temporary” eventually became the word worthy of quotation marks.

Over the course of many months, the one or two boxes in the room became intimately familiar with one-another and uncontrollably spawned dozens of children. Apparently the spectacle of boxes making dirty cardboard love also attracted a multitude of unused pillows, blankets, picture frames, computer accessories, books, compact disks, tables, weights, papers, and “nic-naks” (which I do not esteem but have because of well-meaning friends and relatives). Whatever the actual cause of the congregation of loose and untidy objects, eventually the room became a jungle of “crap” that was neither too useless to throw away nor too important to be used with any regularity. Finally, something in my life was disorganized and for months I couldn’t have been happier with my progress toward filthy.

I should mention that at some point last year I actually became determined to be less compulsive in an attempt to spark some long-buried creativity. Reasoning that rigid organization of my general life and apartment somehow had stifled the random thoughts that birthed creativity in writing, I vowed to scramble my living space. By yesterday, the apartment looked awful and no one could claim that hadn’t become less “anal” (or enamored of quotation marks to be sure).

Pity it turns out anality doesn’t stifle creativity as much as lazality. Which is to say that after ten months of being uneasy at the deteriorating condition of my home, and possibly attracting rodents, the only thing I had started to create with greater regularity was garbage. It was time to chuck the whole “amateur behavioral psychologist” stinker and just get on with some spring cleaning.

So now, still honoring my mother’s generous gift, I am standing here in front of my computer and simultaneously watching “The River Wild” on some Encore cable channel. My spare room has morphed, through hernia inducing physical and mental effort, into something resembling a clean and tidy work-out room/storage area. Though not aesthetically appealing from a design perspective (and what around here is?), the room is organized enough to afford a space in which I can weight train. You can never go back to Eden, apparently, and so mystically the room will be partially storage until I move. But such price, wisdom.

Now so far I haven’t mentioned anything related to losing mass on my body, but I think on the balance I shed a great deal of weight off my mind. For in the process of cleaning today I threw away a great many things that at one time I considered memorabilia too precious to abandon. The junk, indescribably varied, simply ceased to haunt me or pain me or in some cases interest me. Although one day I may pine away for those things I released into Infinity today, overall the paring of my accumulated belongings was cathartic.

Now to pare down my ass.

If only THAT were as easy as throwing out some old boxes.

Pigassus