Clutter

I love clutter. I love it slightly more than I love the idea of living a sparse, Spartan life, free of complications and trivial objects, just the clothes on my back and two dozen loyal samurai minions, ready to lay down their lives for me when ninja enemies come bursting in through the dojo windows.

My room is filled with crap, and I love all of it. Rows of Transformers; plastic gladiators from another planet pose on my shelves, slowly gathering dust. Novels, comics and assorted geek books are piled everywhere and anywhere, most of them well thumbed and much read over the years. I have garishly coloured cheap crap found in Kinder Surprise chocolate eggs, and small mementoes that long since ceased mementing, that sit alongside incense holders and slightly more useful items like aftershaves and deodorants and pill bottles. Electronic brickerbrack; computers and printers and portable hard drives and cellphones blink and hum and whirr in the background.

There is a perverse appeal in burning the lot of it, watching years of accumulated dross blast back into their component atoms. At first I thought such an urge to be nihilistic, but it now strikes me as quite liberating, possibly even life affirming. I would dance around the flames like a mad atavistic shaman, like an entirely cliché Tyler Durden wannabe, and I would be free of the things of self, of the things that kept me tied down.

This is of course never going to happen*. I lack the conviction and so it remains an amusing little idea, a notion that illicits a smile and the basis for a semi interesting little online ramble. But it has started me thinking about the obvious metaphor; that is, what non material things I can afford to cut out of my life, and what I'm holding onto out of fear of letting go.



* Stay tuned for a midlife crisis coming to blogs near you!