I have a recurring nightmare in which I arrive home from work and stop at the front desk of my building to pick up my mail, and along with the customary assortment of bills and catalogs and fund-raising letters addressed to a person named McElligott who lived in my apartment back in the 70s, I get a package from Amazon.com, and I open it in the elevator on the way up to my apartment, and I walk down the hallway on my floor and peruse the book jacket, and I step into my apartment with the book under my arm, and as I close the door behind me, the floorboards utter a groan of death and collapse underneath me, and my new book and my cat and all my furniture and I land in the apartment below, just as I knew we would one day, as a direct result of my owning too many encyclopedias of 80s television and true-crime compendia and books about bad movies and biographies of Elvis. Okay, so I don’t really have a recurring nightmare about that, but I do have too many books. I long since filled up one large bookcase, two small bookcases, three boxes, and several closet shelves, and I have now resorted to using them as doorstops and forcing friends to borrow them. (“But I don’t even like John Cheever.” “You’ll learn. Now, how about a Norton Anthology?”) In fact, I have too many things, period. Look no farther than my studio for a perfect illustration of the Francis Diaz law of dynamic possession kinetics, which basically states that your crap will expand to fill up whatever space you occupy.

I literally cannot throw anything away. Noticing last week that the bar in my closet had bowed into the shape of a pained smile, I rolled up my sleeves and plunged in to weed out my wardrobe. After the better part of an hour – most of which I spent in front of the mirror, modeling items I had forgotten I owned in the first place – my Salvation Army-bound pile of clothing consisted of exactly one shirt and one pair of sneakers. And I put the sneakers back. I can’t wear them anymore, because after nine years of wear they smell like the maw of death and don’t give my feet any support, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out because I consider them my friends. I stood next to the trash can, the shoes in one hand, my nostrils pinched closed with the other, and I remembered how much those sneakers and I had gone through together, and I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t add any other vestments to the pile either, because I feared that I might want to wear them one day, even though many of them had gone out of style, come back in style, and gone back out of style again without leaving their hangers. One blouse in particular has accompanied me to no fewer than three different places of residence, and I haven’t worn it once, but still I felt I should give it just one more chance.

My inability to thin out the herd doesn’t just apply to clothes (and shoes – do I need black shoes with a medium heel, black shoes with a block heel, black Mary Janes with a block heel, black Mary Janes with no heel, black slides, black pumps, black brogans, six-
hole black boots, ten-hole black boots, black Pumas, black sandals, black Tevas, and black Birkenstocks? Apparently, I do. Apparently, I need similar styles in various other colors as well). I can’t bear to discard anything. Why? For starters, my snarly exterior masks a deeply sentimental nature, and I like having a lot of stuff around to remind me of the past. This tendency, combined with a raccoon-like attraction to shiny trinkets, has filled my domicile to the brim with largely useless clutter. I may have inherited the pack-rat gene from my father, who could produce his tax returns from the late 60s if necessary, and who has festooned his study with every single demented piece of Father’s Day art that either of his children ever made. I think that both of us fear that too thorough a cleaning might result in the loss of an invaluable item, but Dad usually hoards for practical reasons, and he hoards alphabetically; I just hoard. Dad puts everything away; I don’t put anything away, because the act of putting something away automatically erases any memory of its existence from my mind. I can’t tell you how many times I have whipped open a drawer while ransacking the house in search of a 9-volt battery or a set of “croakies” for my eyeglasses and said, “Hey! I wondered where that got to,” or “Wow, I have a tape measure – neat!” or “Note to self: don’t buy any more colored pushpins at Staples because you already have SEVEN packages in FOUR DIFFERENT DRAWERS.”

So I just leave everything out – on shelves, on tables, on the floor, in piles, in piles of piles. A current inventory of things that I need to file or chuck or put where they belong one of these days includes: a mini-Spirograph set; CDs that I haven’t gotten around to selling; a frog bath toy; the wind-up hopping pig that Amygirl gave me, which I have tried to put in a drawer no fewer than five times, only to start playing with it; all the books of matches I emptied out of my bag two weeks ago; my Russian-steppes fur hat, which never quite gets out the door on my head because it makes me look like a big gray Q-tip; a blank tape on which I meant to copy a CD for my brother, but I can’t remember if I already copied it or not, so I need to play it to find out, but I keep forgetting; a flower pop-bead set; a pair of nail-clippers; a tin of Carmex that my friend left here about two months ago; instructions for operation of my air conditioner; a book of paper cut-out dinosaurs; the Biscuit’s copy of Unforgiven; photos which I want to put into my photo album, but I’ve needed photo-album refill pages for over a year and haven’t managed to buy them yet; a profusion of tax forms; the triple-A batteries that didn’t fit my VCR remote; an empty box that I haven’t figured out a use for; 5×7 picture frames that don’t happen to fit any of my pictures; the Lego set I got from Wing Chun for Christmas, still unbuilt; the empty box from my copy of Microsoft Encarta; a vintage print of a tomato soup advertisement, which has bite-marks in the plastic because the cat likes to “teeth” on it; a check for $230; a legal pad; a red pen (also has bite-marks – the cat likes plastic a lot); a front-door ornament that I had to take down when they repainted my door; Dictaphone tapes, maps, books, placemats, receipts, and other jetsam from my US 1 trip; sunglasses whose left lens I have to glue back in; speakers from my old stereo; a stuffed shark; a Casper The Friendly Ghost gum toy; a champagne cork; a tiger belt buckle that doesn’t fit any of my belts; my journal; and an order form for a Guinness pint glass. Keep in mind that I’ve only listed the things I haven’t put away; my top desk drawer contains an even more absurd assortment of keepsakes.

Once every few months, I attempt to winnow. It never works. Do I need a dragon hand puppet in order to survive? No. Will I spend the rest of my life mourning the passing of a broken Miss Piggy Pez dispenser? Not likely. Do I anticipate an emergency in which the availability of not one but three Itty Bitty Book Lights will make the critical difference? Not really. Did I do the pinecone I liberated from a Georgia interstate rest stop a favor by bringing it to the big city? Hardly. Do I really own all of those things? Yes, I do, and I’ll probably wind up keeping them forever. The last time I moved, I threw a few things away – and I do mean “a few.” I think I wound up jettisoning a barrette, a cat toy I found behind my desk, and the perishables in my refrigerator; I made the grand gesture of lugging my old TV table out to the curb, discovered that another tenant had left a superior TV table out there just moments before, and hauled it back inside. Naturally, it weighed more than the first one. I bought a cafÈ table and two chairs so that I wouldn’t have to shovel everything off of the coffee table to eat dinner, but flotsam soon overtook that table also, and I’ve gone back to sitting on the couch and balancing a plate on my knees.

I guess it doesn’t do any harm to own this much stuff, or to keep most of it out where I can see it all the time. I don’t leave food out or anything, and for the most part I keep my clothes picked up. I like to open a box and root through it and remember where I got the things inside, or when I got them, or who gave them to me. I like to read old letters; I like to look at old movie stubs; I like to stay in bed on Saturday mornings, surrounded by the books and magazines that migrated there over the course of the week, and read until I get hungry. And while I feel a nostalgic attachment to a lot of my things, I know which things really matter. Once in a while, I stage my own private fire drill; I time myself to see how long it takes to pop the cat into his carrier, throw my laptop and my jewelry box into a bag, and run down the nine flights to the ground floor. I would miss all my dictionaries and sweaters and toys and letters, of course, but if I got the feline and the computer and the jewelry down the stairs in one piece, I could live without the other stuff. The Biscuit can always buy me another Salt Lake City snow globe, after all, but I’d have a harder time replacing my pet. I should just accept my fate and rent a storage locker; I’ll take the TV and the cat and a hot-plate and live in the storage locker, and I’ll visit the rest of my stuff here in the apartment on weekends.

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