The Great Study Home Office De-Crapping is <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/office after for real.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/office after for real.html’,’popup’,’width=422,height=316,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false”target = “_blank”complete. I can’t remember the last time I felt so light and airy and carefree. I feel like skipping. Perhaps I will. BRB.
The final tally:
Hours spent de-crapping: 19
Giant fricking garbage bags filled: 16
Increase in dust mite-related allergy symptoms: 7000 percent
Hastings is still freaked out by it. He keeps wandering around sniffing everything as though I’d built an addition on the house. “That’s him in the picture examining my chair for evidence of extreme activities.” I mean, come on, dude. Don’t act so surprised. Have a little tact. Of course, I’ve lived here for five years and had him for four, so it’s entirely possible that there are sections of floor he has never seen.
Yet I still have plenty of crap. If you’re considering buying anything – anything at all – talk to me. Need office supplies? I thought I had a home office, but now I realize I have a <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/welcome to office depot.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/welcome to office depot.html’,’popup’,’width=336,height=252,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false”target = “blank”home Office Depot. I could wallpaper my bathroom with Post-Itsâ„¢.
And for heaven’s sake, don’t buy anything with a cord on it, anything that plugs into anything or anything that has things plugged into it without <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/wired cat.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/wired cat.html’,’popup’,’width=211,height=363,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false”target = “blank”checking with me first. Need speaker wire? I have enough to wire the Pentagon. Coax cable? What do you want, three feet, six feet? Stereo cables? We will not be undersold. RCA to RCA, or RCA to phono jack? How about a little green thing that connects two things I don’t own anymore? In the market for a mobile phone? <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/mobile madness.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/mobile madness.html’,’popup’,’width=390,height=230,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false”target = “blank”Step right this way. And if anyone I know buys a telephone cord, he or she will be strangled with it.
I did discover some more fun stuff, though. I had forgotten how many trip journals I’ve kept in little foreign notebooks over the years. Fascinating excerpt:
“My feet hurt, as does my left knee”
Holy crap! I just found a name and address I wrote in my London travel journal in 1990. It sounded familiar, so just for the hell of it I did a web search. Remember Craig Shergold, the sick English kid whose friends and family started a campaign to get him into the Guinness Book of World Records for receiving the most get-well cards? It’s him. I must have seen an announcement of the campaign in its earliest stages, long before he got well and started begging people to stop mailing him. This means I got spammed before there was email. Now that’s bleeding edge.
Ryan just called. It’s 1:35 a.m., but he was just hanging out at OCSC with REM, so that’s worth calling for. He accidentally drank Mike Mills’ beer. Classic. And apparently Michael Stipe is not a sports fan. Go figure.
Other items from the de-crapping:
A quote from Groves at an Evil Wiener show in 1996:
“Don’t forget to tip your bartender, leave promptly when the show is over and buy a fucking t-shirt”
An item from The Chapel Hill News announcing seats available for a UNC program called “Reading the Stars: Astronomy, Divination, and the Cosmos” The headline is:
Space Available in Astronomy Program
A list written on the back of a Far Side calendar page:
Thunderitchy
Mondale
Topless Bar Sluts of the South
Don’t Touch the Dog There
We Live As We Dream, Stallone
I might have been trying to come up with album titles for my non-existent band, Catflap. That last one is pretty funny, but I have no idea if I made it up or not. I’m like that.
There’s more, but I’ll stick it back in the blog fodder file for a night when the well is dry.
Okay, one last thing. I found a rough draft of a personal ad I considered placing in 1994. I was trying to play with the conventions of the genre, and it’s painfully over-clever “”I like long walks on the moon and candlelit dinners on the beach” but I still like the final line, which requires remembering NBC’s “Must See TV lineup from that period:
Friends first, then Seinfeld.
You’d have answered that ad, right?