Mind Your Own God Damn Business

My Mother is a pack rat.

My Father is stressed out by clutter.

He retired recently, which means that he spends a lot more time at home, giving him far more opportunities to fixate on how messy the house is.

He reacts to this in the following fashion: He spends two months swallowing his rage and packing it up tightly in a little ball in his chest, and then he freaks out and throws some stuff away.

There are a lot of things wrong with that, but the biggest one is this: instead of picking out the largest, most useless things and getting rid of those, he always gravitates towards the things with the most value, regardless of size. I used to think that this was just because he was bad at assessing the value of things. Lately, I’ve began to wonder if it’s more of a passive-aggressive thing, where he’s punishing us for messing up his house.

"I'm sick of this clutter! I'm going to throw away all of those gold ingots. You know, the ones in the basement that are sitting next to the refrigerator box that's full of empty Pepsi bottles and broken glass!"

I was helping my Dad clean the basement this summer. There was a medium-sized box containing a bunch of China that used to belong to my grandmother on my Mom’s side. This grandmother is dead. My Mom considers that China an incredibly valuable family heirloom. I suggested that we just find an out of the way part of the house where we could store it. My Dad wanted to get rid of it. I stressed that maybe we should stack it somewhere instead.

“We’ll just put it in the middle of the playroom,” my Dad replied. “She’ll HAVE to deal with it, then!”

I knew that she wouldn’t “deal” with it, but I also knew that keeping the China out of the trash would keep my mother from murdering my father.

This is what happens six times a year. Roughly one quarter of our storage room is filled with used wrapping paper and bows from past Christmases. None of it ever actually gets used, and we could probably recycle most of it and get rid of a huge amount of clutter.  She doesn’t need it and wouldn’t miss it, and it would be incredibly easy to replace. There are plenty of large, useless things in our basement that we could get rid of to open up space, but instead of the closet filled with used napkins, my Dad is fixated on the manila folder that has our birth certificates and a rough draft of the constitution in it.

Last week, he was in another of his frenzies and was determined to throw away the rocking chair that my Mom breastfed us in when we were babies. Sure, it’s busted up and none of us have breastfed in almost 20 years, but my sister and I almost had to hold an intervention to keep him from throwing it away. I don’t care about that chair, but I do care about my parent’s marriage, and if they get divorced or one of them murders the other one, I don’t want it to be over that chair.

Another time, he tried to throw away my computer keyboard. For those of you that don’t know, a computer keyboard is only about the size of a loaf of bread and I use it to OPERATE MY FUCKING COMPUTER, which is something that I do pretty much every day.

This is what I mean: He singles out the most valuable item in the room, and then, regardless of size, storability or sellability, becomes convinced that it must be thrown away. I’ve tried to convince him that if he really wants something out of the house, he should tell my mom that she has a month to find a place for it, and if she can’t do it by then, he’s going to get rid of it. He refuses.

A few years ago, when he hit one of these sprees, he decided that he had to get rid of my CD collection.

I was pretty pissed off about it at the time (and still kind of am), but it hasn’t been the end of the world. Most of my music is on my hard drive anyway. I almost never use physical CDs anymore. There’s really only one situation where I miss it.

Ahh, the late 90's. Who DOESN'T miss those halcyon days of 200mhz computers, 56k internet, Boy Bands, Ally McBeal and uncontrollable acne?

Occasionally, I like to dust off music that I listened to when I was younger for nostalgia’s sake. If it’s something that I haven’t heard in 10 years, it can be kind of fun to hear it again, even if I don’t really like it anymore. I’ll remember putting it on a mix tape and listening to it in my Walkman on the way home from school, or riding somewhere in the car with Kevin, or day dreaming about some girl I liked that probably would’ve been into me if I’d tried to talk to them instead of just staring at the ground. I’m getting old enough that I don’t always remember what it was like to be a teenager, but if I hear an old song that I haven’t heard since the late 90′s, it gives me a little flashback of being completely fucking crazy, which sucked sometimes, but was a lot of fun on other occasions.

The problem is that to do this, I need to find music that I liked a lot that I haven’t heard in 10 years. If I’ve listened to it since then, it doesn’t really remind me of anything in particular, but If I haven’t heard it in 10 years, chances are that I’ve completely forgotten about it. I wasted almost all of my time and energy in high school on CDs (well, and barely playable mac ports of PC games that had been out for six years), and I have a less than photographic memory of what bands I liked and didn’t like.

That’s where my CD collection used to come in. I could usually find something that I had completely forgotten about and toss it in to see if I still liked it at all and trigger some old memories that I didn’t even know were still in my brain in the process.

Now that I don’t have the CDs anymore, it’s mostly just luck. I’ll stumble on something out of the blue, or I hit my head on the side of a toilet, and instead of inventing the Flux Capacitor, I’ll go “Huh. I wonder whatever happened to Dubstar?”

I had one of those moments a few days ago, when I remembered a band called Orange 9mm. I don’t know why I suddenly recalled them, but I did. I couldn’t remember what I thought of them, or even what their music sounded like, so I gave them a listen. All in all, they’re not too terrible. I think this probably sounded a lot better in 1995, but I think I still kind of like it.

Takes me back.

Well, I should probably get away from the computer for a while. I lucked out and scored another snow day today, and I need to get as much use out of it as possible.