A Place for My Stuff

Electronic Mail Clutter

Clutter doesn't have to be physical.  It can be in the form of electrons.  I'm talking about computer-related clutter: filled Inboxes, too many desktop icons, too many unnecessary files, etc.  It's good to go through these once in a while.  Last August marked 15 years since I got my first email account.  I have a lot of old stuff saved, but a lot of newer stuff not saved at all.  And these days with unlimited quota on most accounts, I'm no longer forced to clean up my Inbox from time to time.  Which can be a bad thing.

Taking a look at my main email's Inbox, I notice I had over 1800 emails.  And that's just in the Inbox!  I figured I'd comb through to see if I could delete at least 25% of it. 

To speed things up, I wanted to go after the stuff that I figured I could delete right away without much hesitation.  First I went straight to the oldest emails first.  I found a funny article.  Old, but still funny.  And the link still worked after 3 years.  Also old Craigslist ads I copied and sent to myself.  Well needless to say, these ads aren't active anymore.  I deleted a few other things, but this wasn't getting me far.  This is probably because if I've been holding on to emails for over 3 years, chances are they were hard to let go of in the first place.

So I tried searching for other things, like unread emails, and sorting by name or subject.  Sorts like these usually give you a bunch of emails you can delete immediately, because often the emails you get from frequent mailers (Amazon.com, mailing lists, etc.) pile up and all have the same subject line or "From" name.  Here's a summary of what I deleted:

• 10 Really old automatic announcements from job recruiters.  Boy do I miss the 2008 economy.
• 50 old newsletters or ticket statuses from concert venues or Ticket Master.  With just about any venue, you buy tickets from them once and you're forever on their mailing list.  Yet you don't want to unsubscribe because you do like the place and come back.  Still, the unwanted stuff piles up.
• 98 emails from other newsletters and other announcement lists. These include everything from friend's bands, comedians, bars, restaurants, etc.  Some of these I've already unsubscribed to.
• 10 pieces of spam.  That's surprisingly not very much.  I guess I have my spam filters to thank.
• 47 other random emails.  Utility bill receipts, Apple.com stuff, those annoying Evite invitations from friends, the struggle with re-registering and maintaining all of my domain names, and plenty more.
• I also moved a total of 235 emails to different folders where they belong.  Yes, I know this doesn't really cut down on the number of saved emails I have.  It just hides them in a new place.  Still, my goal tonight was to get rid of a quarter of what's in the Inbox, so I accomplished that.

I still have over 1,000 emails in my Inbox.  But I at least got rid of 25% like I intended to. I'm sure I can do more if I give myself another time to sit down and do it.

How about you?  Do you have over 1,000 emails sitting around?  Maybe on a web-based email account, where if by some chance you lost that account, you'd lose a LOT of important information saved over the years?  If you say, "That's nothing.  I have over 8,000 emails in my Inbox!" then that's nothing to brag about.  Do something about it!  Set a reasonable initial percentage goal.  See what easy stuff you can get rid of first.

Back from T-day. And the House on the Rock.

Boss: "I'm transferring you to our Green Bay office."

Employee: "Green Bay?!? Are you kidding me?  There's nothing there but beastly women and football players."

Boss: "Excuse me, but my WIFE is from Green Bay!"

Employee: "Oh.  Er...so what position does she play?"

It's the only Wisconsin joke I really know, but there you have it.  I'm back from my Thanksgiving vacation in Madison, Wisconsin.  This included a trip to The House on the Rock.  I could spend time raving about this amazing place, showing pics and video I took, and so on.  But instead I'll just get to the parts truly relevant to this blog.

The House on the Rock is, much like Castle in the Clouds or Hammond Castle, a home that was built by some eccentric guy, filled with stuff, and eventually turned into a profitable tourist attraction.  I really do admire people like this.  We have the ability to create our own world.  The technology is there.  So part of me certainly wants to get a big place and turn it into an oddity.  However, the reality is that true clutter won't make a tourist attraction.  Nobody is going to pay admission to see somebody's collection of 40,000 pieces of junk mail, unless maybe they were fashioned together to make a gigantic frog statue.

That doesn't mean having my own bigger place to decorate is out of the question.  I'm just saying that I have to get rid of the clutter first, THEN move out, THEN take care that the clutter problem still gets addressed before it ever gets out of control.  In the meantime, step 1 still continues.

Where Did I Put That Thing?

Getting ready for my T-day trip, I've been trying to find gifts that I that bought over a month ago and somehow knew I'd be hunting to find at the last minute.  Guess I'm clairvoyant.

Naturally, along the way I found some junk to deal with.  Every little bit counts.

• Crappy photos of me.  I'm not talking about photos that didn't get my good side.  I'm talking about photos that are just plain defective.  Some time ago my mother sent me two photos of me from a few Xmases ago.  I'm posed differently in both photos in two completely different places, yet in both photos, there is some strange white string going over my face, as if somebody was swinging around a sparkler in the same photo.  I still don't know what caused this.  Is this evidence of ghosts?  No, it's evidence of a crappy photo.  My mother found it amusing enough to send to me.  But I really have no use for these.
• Birthday cards.  Gee, I guess I wasn't exclusively keeping these on the top of my fridge after all.
• Restaurant menus.  Damn, more of these floating around too.  Into the file you go.
• Car-related coupons.  And not expired!  Might as well stick these all together somewhere.
• Numerous catalogs and newsletters.  Trader Joe's, Aldo shoes, MusiciansFriend.com, Staples, and other places where I shouldn't be spending a lot of money at the moment.  The alumni publication from my college is the worst.  I can't stand it.  It just screams "Here are all these other people who graduated from the same school as you, but are doing things in the engineering world that are one hundred times more fun than what you're doing!"
• Printed directions from Yahoo/Google Maps. I think I had no less than 20 of these sheets piling up in the back seat of my car.  And most of them for places that I'll never go to again in the near future, if ever again.  Looks like my recycle bin just got heavier.
• Printed article from the web.  And a really long one too.  But like the directions, I know what site I can go to, should I want to read it again.
• Expired coupons.  Do I even have to give these a second thought?
• Printed/written Led Zeppelin chord charts & lyrics for stuff I did in my last band.  No sense in keeping these around.
• Flight Info for a flight from last year.  Into the shredder, I guess.

And after all of this, I still couldn't find the stuff I was originally looking for.  Damn.

George Carlin's posthumous book

George Carlin's Last Words: A Memoir was released recently.  I haven't bought it yet, but knew that it was well worth mentioning here.  I remember seeing Carlin back around 1997 when he was mentioning his first book, Brain Droppings.  That night he said, "It's not an autobiography...that shit comes later."

Here's some info on the book from GeorgeCarlin.com:

For more than ten years prior to his death in June 2008, George Carlin had been working on his autobiography with Tony Hendra, one of the original editors of National Lampoon magazine and author of the bestselling memoir Father Joe. When Carlin died, Hendra approached Carlin’s family about releasing the book. Based on hours of taped interviews, drafts, and polished chapters from their sessions, LAST WORDS is George Carlin’s life story as it has never been told before.

LAST WORDS is pure, unadulterated Carlin—full of the wit, charm, and mischievous insight that made him one of the most iconic and admired comedians of the past 50 years. The book is an irreverently funny, yet deeply honest, story about George’s life, from birth to his childhood in Manhattan to life on the stage. It is told as only Carlin could. Carlin has published three New York Times bestselling books, including When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, Brain Droppings, and Napalm and Silly Putty. LAST WORDS is a fitting addition to his long list of accomplishments.

Carlin is candid about both his career and his personal life throughout the book, addressing his 20-year tax battle with the IRS; a decades-long struggle with cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol; and his run-ins with the law. Carlin also writes intimately about his family life, stemming from his nonexistent relationship with his father, and the inevitable complications that led to with his mother. His 36-year marriage to first-wife, Brenda, is discussed with honesty and vulnerability, and his relationship with their daughter, Kelly, is threaded throughout the book, giving readers a glimpse into what George was like at home as both husband and father.

LAST WORDS also delves into Carlin’s work as a stand-up comedian, and his acting aspirations, in which he offers a frank account of his talent: “I was devastatingly inept! There were no Oscars in sight.” In the end, the book is a celebration about a boy from Harlem who knew how to make people laugh and forever changed the face of comedy in America and the world.

Shelve It, File It, or Pitch It

I know I've said before that buying more space for your stuff is really not a solution.  It's just a way to store and hide more stuff you don't need.  But there's certainly a limit to that.  Sometimes a bookshelf really IS a solution to books that are otherwise building up on the floor.  SOMETIMES, the clutter solution is just putting things back where they belong.

A wade through my living room had me discovering the following items:

• Sheet music.  No less than 8 of these books lying around, along with 3 vintage sheets and a few photocopied pages.  I'm not surprised that Don Aslett wrote a little section about sheet music in Clutter's Last Stand.  These go into my little cabinet with the rest of the sheet music.
• Vacation stuff.  Airfare tickets, brochures, and all that crap.  Some of it has apparently been lying in corners of my room for over a year or two.  These things either get filed with the rest of my vacation stuff (they do come in handy with new trips) or thrown out.
• Old article print-outs.  Things either photocopied from magazines or printed from the web.  If I read it, and I'm done with it, and I can still find it on-line or printed in a book, then there's no point in keeping it.  One of these was a 1999 article my old boss gave me regarding the impact of (brace yourself!) high-speed internet in households!  OK, I got my nostalgic chuckle.  Time to chuck this thing.
• Teenage Stories.  Wow, speaking of nostalgia!  When I was around 13 or 14, I wrote a number of stories.  Tasteless, pure indulgent, juvenile, first-person, fantasy fiction.  Laced with anarchy.  I was inspired by similar writings my friends were doing.  Maybe I should post some excerpts or read them on my radio show.  Then again, maybe they're so ridiculous that I can't believe I wrote them.  I'll take a read.
• More papers.  Car maintenance receipts.  Computer equipment receipts.  Jury duty stuff.  I have files for these things.  In they go.
• Books on the floor.  I may just need a separate blog entry on dealing with these.

Trust me when I say this is just the tip of the clutterberg. But getting rid of a handful a day could add up.

Upon The Fridge

Here's a question.  How come "refrigerator" has no "d", but "fridge" does, and it's supposed to be an abbreviation?

Here's a question that isn't rhetorical, because it's a detective question.  How you can tell if a house has children, just by looking at the refrigerator? 

Having magnets on the front that hold up crayon drawings is a good sign but not always guaranteed, because aunts, uncles, and field trip coordinators might have such drawings too.  A+ graded tests and quizzes from school are a definite sign, but that only happens if the kid is old enough, and not a complete dunce.  You could look inside and maybe find individual juice boxes and apple sauces, but sometimes those are also bought by graduate students and other adults who still pack their own lunches.

Instead, try looking on top of the fridge.  If it doesn't have cabinets overhead, and if every square inch on top is overcrowded with cereal boxes, cleaning sprays, and every other appliance imaginable, despite the fact that there are plenty of cabinets and counter space all around, then chances are good there's a toddler in the home.  Why?  Because not only does the top of the refrigerator make a quick and convenient place to stick stuff, but from a child's perspective it's very, very high from the ground.  No, I don't have children.  But I've seen this "safe spot" in action many times.

Being a bachelor, I have no problem keeping a bottle of Formula 409 lying on the floor and coffee tables with sharp corners.  But as has been stated before, any flat horizontal surface can become a magnet for clutter.  It starts with "I'll put this down here, for now" and grows from there.  My refrigerator top is no exception.

Here's what I found:

• 49 Greeting Cards.  When I get cards for my birthday or some other event, I put them on top of the fridge for display.  Then I eventually put them flat down and pile up more cards on top of them.  I knew the number was accumulating for some time, which is why I checked out the top of the fridge in the first place.

• Old subway schedule.  I can get these on-line.
• Phone books.  Hey, you know what?  I can get all of the information here on-line too!  The only time I want to look at these is when I want to look at the local town map, a list of local town restaurants, or look in the front pages to see concert seating charts.  So I'll tear out the map and keep the think local phone book, and toss the other 3 incredibly thick ones.  Yes, they send me more than one phone book every year.
• Dominos coupons.  No apparent expiration date, but I don't care.  When do they ever STOP with the coupons?  They give you 8 new ones every time you order a damn pizza.
• Street map of the Greater Boston area.  In other words, the shady sections.  On one hand, this is the kind of thing that could save my life in some situations.  On the other hand, I already have in my car a laminated map of Boston and the surrounding cities.  No point in keeping this.
• Menus to 3 local restaurants.  These are good to have!  Just not on top of the fridge.  Into the filing cabinet you go, under "menus", where I can find you next time.
• Odd recipes for Crown Royal and Twinkies.  Not both together.  I mean some drink recipes I printed out that use Crown Royal, and some bizarre dessert recipes you can make out of Twinkies.  They had their novelty value.  Time to just ditch them.  They won't be remembered.
• A print out of the following cartoon from Mad magazine.  Just part of my sick humor, I guess:

• George Forman grill.  Which I've never opened because I have no counter space.  I do however have two small but completely unused cabinets behind and over the fridge.  Putting the Grill in there means I can put the blender on top of the fridge, which means I can move one of the boxes on the kitchen table, which means I've finally freed up space on the kitchen table to take the remaining box off the kitchen floor and on to the table!  MY KITCHEN FLOOR IS FINALLY FREE!

Crime Stuff

Don't worry.  This isn't a blog entry about finding bloody weapons and dead bodies that have been piling up behind my couch as clutter.  I don't mean THAT sort of "crime stuff".  This is just a blog about OTHER stuff related to criminal activity.

An artist friend of mine has been doing a weekly series of drawings for ChiefMag.com (soon to be Superchief.tv).  Namely, he's been illustrating bizarre crimes and incidents from police blotters.  Bizarre Blotters is now in its 20th week. Check out the drawings along with links to the original stories here:http://www.grotesquerie.com/search/label/bizarre%20blotter 

~

I was also listening to River of Crime, the 2005 release from my favorite band, The Residents.  (Some of you who know me through a certain message board, might notice that I made my avatar out of one of the pics on that page.)  It was a great little project that should have been much more popular than it was.  I started threads on message boards about it.  I played tracks on my radio show.  Not ONE person ever commented on it.  The album was released by a series of podcasts called "Crimecasts", in the style of a crime drama show, not unlike the ones from the golden age of radio. 

Here's how it worked.  You bought the double CD set in the stores.  The CDs were actually blank, but the set included a password to the riverofcrime.com website (now defunct) where you could download the weekly podcast, along with artwork, the script, etc.  The idea is that once you had all of the episodes, you could then burn it yourself to the blank CDs to have a CD copy.  Again, WHY such an innovative idea never really took off, I have no idea.  Regardless, they eventually released a "normal" CD version.

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But speaking of crime and clutter, guess what?  If you're a pack rat, then you might be able to plead "Insanity"!  Check out this article about a woman charged with embezzlement. "Through testimony, cross-examination and arguments, Berry showed Clifford suffered from bipolar disorder and was hooked on eBay, often sleeping only two hours nightly and filling her home with boxes of collectibles and thousands of dollars in Goodwill clothing that made walking through the home nearly impossible." Hmm.  Maybe I should stop trying to clean up my place, and get money for it.

A Bachelor in the Closet

So I took a deeper look into my enormous linen closet, and found more things.

• A box of envelopes from a company I no longer work for.  No, I didn't steal them.  They had our old office address on them so they were going to throw them out anyway.  And to think, I've since BOUGHT envelopes to use for my landlord, never mind saving envelopes from the utilities I pay by the phone and thus don't need an envelope for.  Well, no more of that.  Time to use these envelopes or get rid of 'em.
• Tissue box cover.  So THAT'S where that thing went.  I put it back on the tissue box.  Aesthetics and mucous peace have now been restored.
• Gum canisters from Starbucks. They make a great after-coffee gum.  It comes in little decorative metal tins which, to packrats like me, just seem too good to throw away.  Well, not this time.
• More new-agey candles and stuff.  Are pixies sneaking into my apartment at night and putting these in there?
• More plastic bags.  And again, not "where the bags go".  I don't know if pixies work in bags.  Maybe gnomes?
• Empty boxes that stuff came in.  A few different boxes and containers for items that I already have out and on display.  For example, a little statuette I have of a bear in a devil costume with a hard on.  Why do I still have them?  Well I know why I still have the bear.  He's cool.  But the plastic cylinder he came in?  Beats me.
• Bachelor artifacts.  And now we come to the category that inspired the title to this blog entry.  I'm a bachelor, and it seems I've acquired stuff over the last several years from past ex-girlfriends.

Allow me to expand on that last point. Oh, and if you thought the expired condom tale from the last entry was "TMI" (too much information), then you should stop reading this entry right now.

Still reading?  OK, pervs, here you go.  When I say "Bachelor artifacts", I'm not talking about personal stuff like photos or love notes.  When people save that sort of stuff, it's a conscious effort.  I'm not even talking about more expired condoms.  I'm talking about the impersonal stuff.  I found bottles of nail polish, disposable razors (not mine; I use an electric), emery boards, earring backings, etc.

There's the novelty stuff too.  Some ex of mine included a set of "Blow Job coupons" as a gag gift, probably as part of Valentine's day.  Each page was a cartoonish "coupon", good for a free blow job from the gift-giver.  They had one for "in the car", one for "in a tent", etc.  Cute novelty.  Yet somehow I imagine that if I were to call my ex, she'd say that no, the coupons are no longer valid.  Or that she's no longer a participating location for me.

One set of things though, I knew I just had to throw out.  And I'd already known about it for a long, long time.  Years ago when I was a teenager, I got some kinky sex kit from the adult section of Spencer Gifts.  Or maybe it was when I was in my early 20s and I got it from a porn shop.  I honestly can't remember which.  Anyway, this kit included not only toys, but little bottles of stuff like massage oils, cremes, and powders.  And they were all sugar-based and meant to be edible.  They were also still sealed.  That's because like a lot of my junk, over the years I'd find some way to rationalizing "saving" them because they were just "too good".  Christ, with that attitude, it's a wonder I've ever gotten laid.

Now let's forget about the kink factor and look at the facts here: these were "edible" products that were at least 10 years old, possibly 15.  In fact, who know how long the the kit was sitting on the shelf before I bought it.  It could very well have been 20.  Was it spoiled?  Well given how artificially made this stuff was, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't.  But I sure as hell was not going to try it.  The only thing more UNsexy than squirting a coagulated clump of fossilized artificial sugar on your lover, would be trying to lick it off and pretending you enjoy it.

I also spent some time looking through the kitchen stuff I mentioned yesterday.  I managed to eliminate one of the small boxes by either throwing out what was in there or moving it to one of the other boxes.  Unfortunately, the box I eliminated wasn't big enough to make room for the box on the floor.  So I still have a box on the floor.  I tried shifting around the boxes on the table to different positions.  It was like playing Tetris, only without the fun.  Oh well, at least it didn't involve toxic x-rated novelty items.

Kitchen Table? Not a solution.

I went back to work on the clutter in my kitchen.  I moved more stuff to other rooms and closets.  And I put back the folding table that I had taken down 2 years ago so I could use it in October 2008 and October 2007 (maybe even earlier than that).  With the table back up, I just moved boxes from the floor on top of the table.

Yes I know this doesn't get rid of stuff, it just moves it a few feet up off the ground.  But clutter-wise, not being on the floor is better than being on the floor, since floors do have to be cleaned once in a while.

So I did it and...damn, still not enough.  I still had a box remaining on the floor.  And no, the solution is not to get another table.  The solution is to go through and try to eliminate a box or two that's still in the room.

Like I said last time about decluttering the kitchen: slowly, but surely.

I'm Still Alive. Just call me fourteen-eyes.

Yes, I'm still here.  I haven't forgotten about the blog.  So far, this is the longest I've gone without updating.  Oh well, some people skip months at a time, let alone one week.

Time for another edition of "Why Do I Still Have this?"!  A quick search in the linen closet brings up these.

 

• 5 old pairs of glasses. Actually I only found 4 in the closet (pictured above) but then I remembered a 5th pair I had somewhere in my living room.  This makes me wonder if in fact I own every single pair of glasses I've ever been prescribed. I wouldn't be surprised if I have one or two more old pairs lying around. 

And yes, these are "old" pairs.  For those of you lucky enough to not have a vision impairment and don't know how this works: eye conditions and eyesight tend to change over time for a variety of reasons, which means glasses tend to need to change over time for a variety of reasons.  In short, if I try on these glasses in place of my present pair, I will not be able to "see" correctly.  So as much as these might have cost in their day, they're of no use to me now.

What do I do from here?  Throw them in the trash?  Pop out the lenses and make a really bad telescope?  Actually, as I think I've mentioned before, many eyeglass vendors or "vision centers" (euphemism for "optometrist with lots of frames to choose from") have bins where you can donate used glasses.  They're given to the homeless or people in 3rd world countries. And to think, little 10 year-old Ndofonsu in the wilds of Zaire has been going blind this whole time, all because I didn't clean out my closet sooner!

• More plastic bags. Sure, we all have too many plastic bags that we keep.  But these aren't even from the shelf where I DO keep my extra plastic bags.  That's pretty bad.  Begone, ye extra bags o' plastique!
• Extra padlock screws.  I already screwed it in years ago.  It's still working fine.  Why do I have these in the package?  Another "just-in-case" justification.  Out you go.
• Psychic Soap.  No, this isn't soap that can read your mind, however great that would be.  And it's not something that skeptic James Randi used to wash his hands of Sylvia Browne.  This is an herbal new-age soap that claims to help focus certain metaphysical properties.  In this case, something to do with psychic awareness.  Or maybe it's just a fancy new-age herbal soap whose fragrance was given the name "psychic".  So how did I end up with it?  Well truth be told, I am a professional Tarot card reader out of Salem, MA.  I've had my hand in the occult scene in one form or another for 20 years.  And the longer you stay around, the more you pick up these weird things.  I'll probably throw it on an eBay auction with a lot of other new-age stuff I've collected.

• Expired condoms.  Do I have to explain this one?  No, but I do feel like I have to justify it anyway.  These aren't the result of a stale sex life.  Honestly, it's just the opposite.  You see, free condoms are everywhere, and when you go to some sex lecture, fetish vendor, bar, etc. they give these things away.  But just any other product where they give away free samples, chances are you've already settled on your own brand that you like more than the others, and tend to stay with that.  So these freebies remain accumulated and unused.  By the way, I tried using the "female condom" with a partner once, and it was ridiculous.  It was like wearing a shower cap on the wrong "head".  Even though the female condom didn't have an expiration date, I didn't care.  Time to toss the bastards.