Nothing like the above for finally digging in and getting your apartment ready to sublet, once you've wiped the puke out from between your toes. I took a deep breath yesterday and took down the ten page-a-day diaries - 1974 to 1984 - from the top shelf of the computer room and systematically ripped them apart one by one and dropped the pieces into the trash, making sure to empty the coffee grounds on top in case a scrap of paper caught anyone's eye on the way to the landfill; ten years demolished in less than half an hour.
I'm still left with the notebooks from my discovery of The Artist's Way, a singularly humorless 'spiritual path to higher creativity,' that never-the-less got me through a horrible patch in 1996; the recommendation was that the reader sit and write 'morning pages' until, if I'm remembering correctly, four pages of notebook had been filled with whatever came pouring out of said reader's head to clear it for the day. They're first on the list today for the trash can and the coffee grounds.
The apartment's been in complete chaos ever since I got here almost three weeks ago and started clearing it out. We're not talking decluttering; we're talking packing anything I think I might want/need in the next two years to take up to Cambridge, storing what I think I might need/want again when I move back in so can't yet bear to throw away, and carting all the rest off to the thrift shop. Not what you'd call a festive holiday season occupation, but after yesterday it's at least beginning to look as though I've accomplished something, even if it's only emptying the book shelves in the computer room and piling what I'm dumping in the hallway.
When I first started the process I thought it was what it must be like if you were dead and then faced with the task of going through your own belongings and emptying out your living space, but that of course would be easy, assuming you could overcome the minor detail of bringing yourself back to life. You wouldn't need any of it and it could all go. As I get deeper into it, it's more like going into the Federal Witness Protection Program and simply eliminating anything that has to do with my almost 67 years of existence from the apartment, not quite so simple as I've lived here since 1974.
However, this is all getting way too philosophical for the title subject and with its effects still lingering, I need to get going on the closets - as soon, that is, as I've ripped up those morning pages and dumped some coffee grounds on them.
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