CLUTTERBUCK

As of this morning I have 66 “drafts” and 430 or so other pages of miscellaneous blog thoughts that I’ve never actually completed or wanted to actually risk publishing for various reasons. Granted, some of those pages consist of barely one line (sometimes it’s merely one word which triggered a long-lost line of thought once upon a time), but nevertheless, that’s still an awful lot of thinking just waiting to be thunk before being flung out into the maelstrom and vigorously ignored.

Some of those postings, especially the ones which made it to the “drafts” stage but then never left, I have just never felt all that sure about. Quite a lot of them never actually got finished, and quite a few more have now been lurking around for so long that they’re really no longer even barely relevant.

So, the question now is, of course, what do I do with all that untapped nonsense…? After all, every so often I do raid it, looking for inspiration, but I seldom feel the need to polish them up to be presented to a disinterested world. Instead I get distracted by some new thought, another wild and crazy idea, or just a little bit of mind-numbingly dull introspection that means nothing at all and is just a pallid rehash of a thought I made earlier…

It’s very much like the clutter I live in at home.

Piles and piles of stuff that I’m either too lazy to sort through, or far too attached to on some level to actually throw out. I could, I suppose, decide to auction great swathes of it off, but I suspect that knowing it’s there is part of the comfort it all gives me.

It’s rather like whenever I used to lend a film to someone (back in the days when they couldn’t just download it themselves). The one thing I then wanted to watch was the one thing I no longer had to hand about the place, and I could start to get very twitchy about it.

I still have a mental tick list of the books that were never returned, no matter how much those borrowers might have tried to convince me that they’d given it back to me. Try doing that with a tenner sometine and see how well that works for you…

I also fear that, the minute I did decide to sell something off, I would then spend months trying to track down another copy, even though it had sat on a shelf untouched for years prior to the big clearout, or, perhaps more alarmingly, I might forget which precious volumes were allowed to go, and then spend weeks turning the place upside-down trying to hunt down  a particular book that is no longer there.

There is a plan for that, by the way, which (I kid you not) involves photographing the book spines before they go off to the charity shop, so that I have a “ready reference” for items that I will know not to look for…

That might seem to be utter madness, but the time and irritation it might save in the long run could prove priceless, and even life-saving, considering how totally focussed I can get about such things.

Endless hours spent churning the clutter to find the one precious nugget which popped into my brain for no very good reason, but which then simply has to be found at all costs, only to turn up in the obvious place after all.

All these problems could be solved by simply reducing the sheer quantity of clutter, but accumulating clutter and stuff and placing it on top of the older stuff like some kind of geological strata seems to be what I do with my life these days, perhaps because I believe that somehow by doing that I’m not going to allow my mind or my memory to slip away.

And now it seems that I’m doing exactly the same thing with my words, too…?