Blogmas Day 4

Today I present a brief photo essay on the taxonomy of piles titled: "Stuff, Junk, or Trash" 

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 We're nearing the end of year 1 in the house and many of our belongings are still A) in boxes or B) piled up somewhere on shelves or in closets. Duck Brand funded a study about moving and according to that limited source, Americans take about 6 months to fully unpack after major moves. And there are some major outliers like boxes in storage for 6 years or books in the basement for 3 years. A lot of it points to people owning and shlepping things around the world that they don't actually have need or place for. 

This morning I threw out a box of items I had been holding on to for nearly a decade. I perceived it to have some emotional value and some practical value, but the start-up energy to in any way make use of the items in the box was enormous for an, at best, intangible pay off. That box traveled from the Knoxville house to storage, from storage to our Virginia apartment, was moved in and around that apartment multiple times as we tried to maximize storage, and finally moved to this house where it sat in my office on the ground for 11 months. It goes out with the garbage tonight. It turns out it was garbage all along, I just needed time to emotionally come to that conclusion.

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But that's about a box of stuff that isn't in the house anymore. What about the piles of things that remain? Cus we have piles, OH BABY we have piles. The renovation process has greatly reduced the potential regular storage options available to us. Items exist in rooms where they don't belong, in positions foreign to their purpose, and with highly variable levels of inertia.

There comes a key moment, a Kobayashi Maru if you will, when a pile of items placed just so, in a temporary location, for a very specific reason, at some time in the past, threatens to be treated by your very logical human brain, which desires to simplify this complex world around it by applying as many heuristics as possible, as though its current location is the proper location for this conglomeration of disparate orphaned items, which are only here due to a series of construction and renovation choices that have caused them to be moved over and over again, from room to room, and now have sat long enough in one place to seemingly belong, despite all notions to the contrary. 

It is in this fraught moment when you may find yourself straightening a pile of books, instruction manuals, DVDs on a kitchen table or contemplating dusting a stack of games sitting on top of an unplugged bluray player on a shelf covered with dog toys. 

And in that moment you must reject this apparent slide towards civility and order, because to do so, to straighten these items, to dust them, to think of this stack of ephemera as a reasonable part of the landscape, would in fact just justify the permanence of this trash pile, this junk that will eventually have a home when a room gets finished, this pile of stuff that you've dismissively waved off cleaning up for 3 months. This is how hoarding starts, the acceptance of this clutter as the reality. So instead, I embrace piles of junk being junk. Things looking out of place is at times a calming reminder that we're in-progress. Of course there's a layer of dust on those things over there, you don't dust things when they're stacked on a counter, only when they have a home. 

Here are some pictures of our piles of junk and stuff, things and crap. It's all temporary and ever shifting and over time all things continue to bend towards order.

-S.