January 2011 Issue
Given my book-lined upbringing, it’s not surprising that it took me until a year or so ago to realize that my office contained way too many books. I had managed to fill five seven-foot bookcases plus one smaller one, and there was a growing mountain of books stacked in front of the bookcases in the corner of the room. It wasn’t really my fault; I had actually purchased only about one out of every twenty books in the room. Some were reference books from my parents’ library, some had been gifts, but the vast majority of them were review copies that had arrived, unbidden, at my P.O. box. Many of these were sent because of this website, but my having reviewed books for three major newspapers at various times probably didn’t help.
I mention all this because I recently bit the bullet and culled the booky herd in my office, boxing up about ten cartons of things to save (now stowed neatly on a pallet in the garage) and setting aside several dozen lesser efforts to donate or sell. This was not easily done, since the ms has made my left hand pretty useless. But the room is now much neater. I’m hoping it stays that way.
I must admit that I didn’t just wake up one day and decide to organize my office, and if any of you folks are looking for a shot of inspiration to tackle a similar stable-cleaning, I’d suggest you watch a few episodes of the apparently wildly popular A&E reality show Hoarders. Each episode deals with two cases of folks who have, at some point and for some reason, lost the thread of good housekeeping and filled their humble abodes (most are lower-income, some truly poor) with the most appalling mountains of crap imaginable. It turns out that there are a lot of ways to hoard. There are those folks whose homes are basically sound and have simply become filled, inexplicably, with $200,000 worth of counterfeit designer purses or thousands of gift-shop tchotchkes meticulously arranged in display cases. Then there are those more creative types who manage to accumulate (and are eventually driven from their homes by) 5,000 “pet” rats or decide that developing a three-foot-deep layer of food garbage and animal feces throughout their house somehow qualifies as “recycling.”
Usually tipped off by a child or relative, into each house troops the Hoarders team of a “professional organizer,” cleanup specialists (with a fleet of dumpster trucks in tow) and a psychologist of some flavor apparently designated to dispense instant psychoanalysis while the rest of the team attempts to get the hoarder to part with several trunks full of moldy headless dolls. Results vary. The rat guy was actually more or less fine with the rats leaving once he knew they were going to good homes. Seriously. No, really, they were. The show people said so. I can’t hear you nanananana.
Some of these folks are pretty clearly mentally ill, and the show provides funds for “aftercare” counseling as part of the deal. Many have family problems that turn out to dwarf their hoarding problem. And a few are not, to put it mildly, what they appear. An episode early in season two featured a guy who went by the name “Patrick Donovan Flanagan O’Shannahan,” or “Sir Patrick” to his friends, apparently an endearing crank with a house full of “collectibles” he thought were worth big bucks. They weren’t, and Sir Patrick wasn’t the real thing either, as revealed a bit later by The Smoking Gun. I’m guessing the show will be running more exhaustive background checks on prospective participants from now on.
Matt Paxton, aka The Paxtinator
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