Clutter In Clutter Out

I live in clutter in every room on every shelf over each inch of my household.  I am relentlessly attacked by toxic ataxia and the chaos it produces.  In fact there are four “masters of confusion” in my house.  All of us place objects that are significant in our world where we think are appropriate locations in the household.  The problem is a tripod leaning against a wall may be a place where another person walks and trips.  But when you're stepping over boxes and balancing a footstep upon stacks of paper it could be hard to know where someone might tread to traverse the living room.  We have wall to wall disorganization in our townhouse.

When entering the front door the dwelling is always unsettling.  There’s no sense of walls or structure – just rummage everywhere.  Luckily the kitchen is a focal point in our digs because there is a raised area in the middle of the floor amongst the disorder.  Beneath this bulge is our island.  From this reference point we can get a “fix” on the location of rooms in the rest of the house.  The island in our kitchen is a profound crap catcher.  Receipts pile up alongside school books and business plans.  Clothing and computer equipment balance precariously three feet above the floor.  Incense burners and 2 liter bottle caps occupy similar positions on this counter.

It's hard to believe that anything like this interior disaster could happen.  The floors are the final assault to the senses.  When shelves and counters were gorged the floor offered storage of last resort.  Overflow was shunted into boxes along side walls.  However, nothing on the carpet stays put for long.  Errant feet kick containers and pets snoot through them. Before long cartons are compromised and the innards spill over the walkways.  Somehow a pullulating debris field has displaced what was an adequate floor plan though lacking in square footage.

Include in the chaos two dogs that shed an immense amount of fur on wood floors, carpets and on top of all the mess.  Canine hair clogs the vacuum and produces a thick gunk that renders the carpet cleaner useless.   Thankfully we do not use either of these household appliances very often.  There's no time to shift the layers of stuff to make an open part of the floor available for cleaning. I might be more successful with a shovel and a wheelbarrow.

In our family unit space is limited but information is infinite and located inside envelopes or written on receipts. The U.S. Mail delivers every day with a fresh supply of shit I don't have time to look at.  I lose royalty checks and contracts and instructions because the last person to explore the interior of our mailbox threw its contents just about anywhere in the house.

Clutter has me in its clutches! There is no escape from all the piles of documents and stacks of periodicals and boxes of books.  After all I live in a small townhouse with far too many humans and critters.  There's just no place to put everything.  Elbowroom, like privacy, does not occur very often in our residence.

Maybe it all boils down to four humans with low self esteem and an inability to make a decision.  That’s what clutter gurus say, but what do they know?  Maybe not one member of the household respects the personal space of anyone else under this roof. Perhaps we are so confined that respect is a luxury we literally have no room for.

Regina Leeds (the Zen Organizer) says my home should be my sanctuary, a buffer against the world.  More often than not my home is a place to escape.  The world is my buffer against my residence.  There doesn't seem to be sanctuary anywhere.

Could there be some sociological epiphany to this interior of horrors?  Is there a light shining in all this dark domiciliary discombobulation?  It turns out that great art may be spawned in such despair.  We could be “expressing” ourselves in all this dishevelment.  Perhaps I am part of a family of virtuosos who work in wrinkled papers and worn magazines thrown on the floor like Jackson Pollock used to throw paint on a canvas. ShelterPop, a website about housing and lifestyle, says it just might be so.

Indeed the trained eye will know us for who we really are; insecure extroverts who avoid childhood memories of family confrontation.  And oh yes, we love kitchen gadgets.

Perhaps in the real world we are a family of slobs - overworked with no time to clean.  Elizabeth Robinson says guilt, grief and attachment can produce an obsessive disorder rendering a person immobile, unable to take action against what all this clutter represents to us.  In our case it is lack of time and energy.  Everyone in my house is trying to bring in money some how.  We’re just too tired.