The rubble and the glory.

Today I took on the ruin. But before that I took on my bureau. But before that, I started on the ruin. The true story is, there is a lot of ruin in my house, and it isn't confined to one room.

My study, though, is the big ruin. Let's analyze:

First there was stuff that just needed to be put away. But before it could be put away, the things that were extra and not necessary and perhaps even egregious needed to be sorted. Old magazines? Boxes with artifacts from my youth? Expired discount cards purchased from long-gone high school athletes? All these things and more needed to be sorted and culled and, in my current ruthless mood, thrown ruthlessly away. Then the putting away could commence. Rinse, lather, repeat, if you see what I mean. This has gone on all day.

"Did Bruiser do this?"

The room, however, has sectors, and all the sectors cannot be dealt with at once. For instance, one of my first goals was to make sure that there were no more books on the floor. We are just about, just about there. Maybe we're even actually there. Now, though, there are papers. Not on the floor, per se, but on the level above that: on the footstools and ottomans. These must also be sorted and gone through. Some things must be shredded. Others must be placed into some sort of conceptual domain, or moved into another room, but preferably into a space where they belong and not into some new vortex of randomness.

Pause: is my house my enemy or my friend?

Tonight, I took everything off my desk and threw away a good cubic foot or maybe more of random nonsense. I will say that my desire for an entirely clean surface is not fulfilled. But there's a much larger area of tidy, not cluttered space, so it's an improvement. For the entirely clean surface to result, I would need to have a better filing system.

Question: what is actually in my files?

Also, I would need to have a place to store the ribbon and glitter, true story.

Well, I continue the sorting and organizing. I hope not to lose momentum before I take the books off the shelves and imagine a more logical and evident order, one that will help me lay hold of the book I want when I want it. But this may necessitate reordering books all through the house. This, as you may imagine, seems daunting.

Also, I need to recycle approximately the contents of one file drawer. I even know which drawer it is. There is also a heap of cameras that need a place to live. But where? where?

For the past two days, my back has been a little twinge-y. This happens, sometimes, when I've been sick, because of the dramatic increase in laying around. It's a thrill to see which sector of the back will twinge next. At the moment, it's the area between my shoulder blades.

Cheers to a cleaner desk, and to books off the floor, and to a plan for greater order and more file space and a place for everything and everything in its place. And to the next stop for back twinges to be elsewhere, wherever twinges go to sort themselves out.

photo credit: whistlesinthewind, "moorland ruin 2"