A clutter king tries to spring clean - FINALLY

I live like a grad student, which frankly embarrasses me at this point in my life. But old habits die hard, especially being single with no one to nag me into shaping up. In other words, it might seem like my inner child RULES, and it ain’t pretty.

It's also not really the case. For instance, there are no diapers.

Still, my small but affordable apartment is done up in a décor others might call bohemian but that I like to call borderline white trash loser/ meets pack rat/ meets hand me downs/ meets OCD victim. It’s an affliction common to writers, especially ones paid at least $20,000 less than your typical warehouse manager (a fact I recently learned which did wonders for my ego).

Judging by some of those reality TV shows, a nice chunk of the rest of the population has a whole lotta clutter, too. We consume. It keeps the economy strong. We fill our attics, making them our own personal version of the Smithsonian archives, and the archives spill out to the garage, then the spare bedroom.

Maybe it’s a good thing I am underpaid. I can only imagine how much more stuff I would have by now. With my affliction, while I own nothing that will get me wealthy, I do have too many books, too many t-shirts, too many CDs (I knew it was time to stop buying when I noticed about four still in shrink wrap), too many pairs of underwear (hey – it means I can wait to do laundry).

I confess: I become emotionally attached to clothing. I have knickknacks which I thought were funny at the time, but now just seem silly, and to an outsider probably more than a bit odd, assuming one would drop in for a visit. Things like toy animals that wiggle and sing, wax statues of dinosaurs you get at Chicago museums, a silver Christmas tree (now in a storage room) decorated with Irish Santas, and Barry Bonds items including a bobblehead and Bonds-as-rubber-duckie. If I would die in my sleep the coroner would pronounce me dead AND weird.

So, with a move more than likely, the landlord finally close to finishing his HGTV projects on the unit below me and close to putting the place up for sale, AND me tired of being such a slob, I finally started to whittle away at my boxes of junk, things my parents left me that I don't really need or want, and crap I have accumulated over the years in preparation to or for who knows what or where at this point. My, that was a long sentence – sort of like one of the piles I sifted through in my quest to become more of a grown-up.

This week I tossed two garbage cans full of stuff, but my compulsion is such that I hate adding to the landfill and try to find homes or charities for orphaned things others might want to add to their own quirky collections of crap/junk/treasure.

Thus I went through my closet full of shirts, t-shirts, sweatshirts and pants and gave two bags of clothes to Goodwill already, those 50-gallon ones. It was not as tough as I thought, given that I could give you a little history behind each and everything I decided to do without. Examples: that tie-dyed green t-shirt, I bought it at Sportmart; that yellow t-shirt, I had it when I worked at a park district; those jazz-themed t-shirts I got at the Jazz Fest in Chicago, where you could get a good deal on them by subscribing to magazines; I bought that Crimson Tide shirt at Kohl’s. I still have pajamas my grandma made for me when I was 6.

I need to stop now. I am scaring myself.

As I said, some of the clothes wound up at Goodwill, along with odds and ends, dust collecting stuff including old cordless phones. I gave more of the same to two sets of friends, who seemed to appreciate the gesture, dropped some books to the library and others to the used book store.

And I played Santa Claus with three bags of stuffed animals inherited from my parents before they moved West last full. I was in Wendy’s, where I often go for lunch, and where this older lady named Carol works. She's a cheery sort and but super nice whenever she waits on me. She calls me Sir, like I'm Peppermint Patty.

On a hunch, I asked her if she liked stuffed animals. She loves them. I next asked if she would like to have the three bags, no strings attached, so to speak, that I was going to bring to Goodwill after work. After I eat, I gave the items to her instead.

Most of the stuffed stuff was Christmas-y, and she looked like Mrs. Claus in her red shirt, hauling the loot to back into the store to keep in the back room until her shift ended and someone came to give her a ride home.

On one hand it made me feel good about myself. On the other, I felt relieved: the toys are hers to deal with now, should she ever run out of space or have to move.

Is this what they call a win-win situation? Hmm, there's still this odd sense of loss. Probably the OCD talking.