Spring Cleaning

The documentary film Possessed spends a few minutes with each of four hoarders. Each hoards different things, for different reasons, and some desire freedom from their stuff more than others.

To me it seems there's a logical progression through the four. The first is the one I think of as most reasonable, probably because he hoards books, which I highly value, too. He's got 6000 books in a one bedroom flat, and he's carefully cataloged them all in a database, including their physical location in the apartment. A fire inspector would probably have a coronary just walking in the door. I could be this guy--I have 6000 comic books, and probably a thousand books.

Contestant number two has a problem with acquisition. Inside of a year, he buys 300 cell phones and stores them, unused, in his stuffed home. He is deeply in debt, and can't seem to stop buying things. He also can't seem to get rid of them once he has them.

The third hoarder is a woman who literally saves junk, albeit somewhat neatly. There are neat stacks of used cosmetic sponges, her kitchen is full of neatly rinsed jars and plastic bottles. She sleeps on half her bed, the other half being stacked with stuff she can't bear to throw out. It looks to me like the reductio ad absurdum of "It's a perfectly good..."  This is the sort of thing I've heard many people, including one of my roommates, say to justify storing some item they have no need of: "It's a perfectly good [item]." It's unthinkable to throw out a perfectly good item, even if you'll never use it, because it's not trash. "That's a perfectly good mayonnaise jar. Someday I could use it to store something in."

Hoarder number four is the sort you think of when you think hoarder (unless you think of cats--thankfully, none of these people hoards live things). He's a rather sad, lonely, late middle-aged man, living in absolute squalor (his once-white stove is black with cooking grease, everything has a thick layer of dust over it) among his piles and piles of trash. As he sits fiddling with a broken pair of eyeglasses and talking about his grief for his deceased mother, all I can feel is profound pity.

I come from a line of hoarders. Great-grandma had stacks of newspapers in her home, and paths from one room to the next between boxes and piles. She had gobs of useless items bought at garage sales and other items she and her pack rat husband deemed "perfectly good..." When their grandchildren cleaned out their home to sell it, construction-grade flatbed trucks were needed to haul away the junk. My grandmother, having grown up in this home, was not much better. When my grandfather made a bedroom out of a partially finished attic, he shoved some of my grandmother's stuff against the side walls and dry walled over it.

I can talk myself out of a certain amount of "It's a perfectly good..."  I can periodically look in my closet and think, "Yes, those are all perfectly good mittens, and I'm never going to wear some of those again," and then throw the extras out or give them away. I can admit that it's time to liquidate the relics of some abandoned hobby. But there are some things I can't seem to get rid of, the worst being the comic books. I throw away magazines all the time, but it's nearly unthinkable to do the same with comic books (I have recently made one or two exceptions). The storage of my comic books is a constant concern, a weight on my life. The thought of moving is horrifying to me, and I fantasize about just walking away from everything I own and letting someone else deal with the disposal.

My roommates contribute more than their fair share to the clutter in our apartment. I try not to be a hypocrite about their clutter. I often remind myself that my collection of comic books is not intrinsically more valuable than the things my roommates hoard. We just value different things, I tell myself, as I jam my coat into the overstuffed closet or gaze despairingly at the "perfectly good" mattress in our tiny front room, or knock over some of the several dozen bottles of shampoo in the bathroom. I remind myself of George Carlin's joke about "my stuff, your crap." Unfortunately, the convergence of my crap with my roommates' crap into a cumulative clutter of crap has become dispiriting.

Possessed is unsettling, bordering on terrifying. That could easily be me. Maybe it already is me, and I just haven't admitted it yet.

Comments

[CLJI]

I am so glad they didn't have a cat hoarder... although I wouldn't be shocked if there was a cat in that last guy's place. I save a lot of stuff and have a very disorganized basement but I do manage to get rid of stuff every so often. We try to sort through the books every year and give some to the local AAUW group's book sale. Of course we probably buy even more books at the sale than what we gave away.(I totally understand the book hoarder... He seems pretty normal compared to the other 3.) I have a few trash bags started of toys to go off to charity or to freecyle. http://www.freecycle.org/

I have the button collection started by Great Grandma and added to by Grandma and then by me. It is rather neat to play with. J. took 100 buttons to school for the 100th day of school celebration... made me realize how many there must really be in that container. I do save some rather odd things. I have a couple of boxes of stuff for future art projects like toy parts and test tubes... and then there is the art paper and fabric collections. I have a box of baby clothes I want to turn into art quilts or something. I gave most of the other baby stuff away. I feel better about my "collections" because they are in boxes.

I can kind of rationalize the saving stuff idea as some sort of primal thing... I don't really understand living in the complete and total filth that the last guy lives in. Did you see the thickness of the dust?

[AppleFoot]

To be fair, it's very difficult to dust clutter. His kitchen really got to me, though.

I bet J. loved the 100 buttons thing. His whole days must've been spent counting.