Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Once upon a time records were kept prospectively in order to support some sort of existence. Transactions of some sort or another would be the most common example. Of course, if one wished to avoid or deny the existence of some sort of transaction, or indeed to deny the existence of some event, one simply had to avoid the creation of a “paper trail” which documented some part of that event. Receipts involved commerce, and if you spent just the tiniest bit of time thinking about it you could limit the number of receipts that were out there.

Now? Not so much. A “receipt” is now any type of irrefutable documentation of some event. Sure, that credit card receipt puts you in that Uber at 0200 in SoHo, but so does the Tweet that mentioned you in passing. Or the pic your companion SnapChatted and was saved as a screenshot. The ultimate, all-time greatest receipt was a certain dress that never made it to the dry cleaners, but nowadays scandals as great or orders of magnitude tinier are rendered factual by the seemingly banal.

Thinking back it’s funny, how I got to be “bingo” here and elsewhere. In those early days of online communication one gave reasonable thought as to whether it was prudent to use your own name online. Heck, my prenup consists of a single line: “Darrell will not run for elected office” so that the family would be spared the scrutiny of an election. To be anonymous in today’s world it takes either herculean effort (try to find something about the family that owns Perdue Pharma, for example), or a complete indifference to that which seems to drive western societies (think bridge troll). What was once the “paper trail” became the “digital footprint” and is now a ubiquitous “universal map” of your life. Does it even matter? One wonders in this day of Alexa and Siri and paying for the privilege of placing the equivalent of Big Brother v1.0 in your own home.

I have endeavored, here and elsewhere, to make kindness the currency of my transactions. Indeed, CrossFit.com (and my blog) have been little “behavioral gyms”, if you will, where I have practiced making kindness the irreducible movement in my interactions. The on-line world in its earlier days was kind of a mulligan for folks of my generation. Not a day goes by that one or another of us sighs in relief that cellphone cameras and social media had yet to be invented when we were young. Now? Now it’s a running tab, a veritable windfall for the social accountants who tally up the score. They are everywhere, and it matters not how many degrees of separation they are from you and Kevin Bacon.

Someone always keeps the receipts.

In the never-ending battle for supremacy on the countertop, my wife Beth and I are ever engaged in a tug-of-war over clutter. Though we were until very recently unaware that this is a THING. Like, with a guru thing, one that people engage in quasi-worship and for which they pay real money. Some “Kon Marie” or something like that. Totally news to us. You?

The anti-clutter thing, such as it is, is dramatically more than the comical little game that Beth and I have going on. Adherents think there is a true spiritual goal, an attainable endpoint that must be reached and then maintained. And not just on the kitchen counter mind you. No, no…on every counter, real or virtual, in every “room” of your life. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is certainly a place for a bit of order in a life, and we could all stand to be a little lighter when it comes to our stuff, but the fervor and the zeal with which adherents of this THING take it is spooky. Weird bordering on abnormal. It reminds me of the kitchen drawer in the house owned by Ben Affleck’s character in The Accountant: one fork, one spoon, one knife.

There’s only one person living there, after all.

Like everything else we can find merit on both sides of the clutter coin. For example, my workouts in the Casa Blanco garage gym have been of much higher quality since a little construction project was completed and the Men With No Last Names cleared out along with all of their stuff. My cleans have been much better now that they are performed in a clean garage. The pleasure that Beth gets from seeing a clean kitchen counter would be comical if it wasn’t so genuine, and frankly my pleasure at seeing her so happy is pretty significant, too. (Note to self: Beth will be home in 2 hours; get cracking at clean up).

There’s a flip side, though. Apparently there is research that validates my little slice of the countertop: people are more creative if they are surrounded by a bit of clutter. As I muse my computer peeks out from a pile of old newspaper clippings, magazines and books, and various chochkies from our life as it is today. Oh, and there would also be the Man Cub’s toys. They are apparently to Kon Marie what kryptonite is to Superman. Though we now live in a tiny cottage, a life that has us in a constant state of “purging” our things, what remains is not so much clutter as it is a measure of our lives and our loves. A clean surface around my keyboard leads to a blank screen. One woman’s clutter is another man’s muse.

I guess this is really just one more essay on the concept of “enough”. The monastic pursuit of any unreachable, unachievable outcome is one that must be accompanied by some degree of unhappiness in my opinion. What joy is there in the perfectly uncluttered closet complete with one pair of perfectly ironed and folded socks if all your eye sees is the possibility of going to work barefoot?

It all makes me think of an essay I read last month about clutter. Have you ever noticed, as did the author, that the arch villain in every movie you’ve ever seen lives in a perfectly ordered home, devoid of any clutter whatsoever? The hero, on the other hand, can hardly find her feet, let alone her socks, as she wades through the clutter of her tiny little hovel. That villain has a plan, meticulously laid out and ready to be put in play with single-minded zeal. Funny thing, though: the hero always seems to make her breakthrough with creativity, flexibility, and something she finds among the clutter, right where she knew it had to be. Every single time.

Now that I think about it, we do have pretty impressive swaths of countertop that are as devoid of clutter as the desert in Lawrence of Arabia. No villains around here, though. I have my tiny little corner of the kitchen table, and as long as you don’t move my “cheese” I know where pretty much everything is. That doesn’t make me the hero, though.

Can we talk about my wife’s closet?