A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

My couch currently sits rather squarely in the middle of my livingroom floor.  There are strange piles of stuff all over the place but most of the floor is quite bare.  My head is a bit more clear than it’s been in some time, despite the afternoon pints I had between hauls to the curb.

I’m on said couch with my mactop in my lap, my back to the open window and a soft chilled breeze is ruffling the back of my neck.

I got everything done I’d said I was going to do.  Of course this means I got far more done than I expected.

My plan for the coming week, insofar as I have one, is to spend the days on the apartment but the evenings on coding and other creative pursuits.

From that template I’m going to go see a couple movies ‘cause I can get to them without the godawful madness of primetime movie watching at the ickyplex a couple blocks from my apartment.

Now, my apartment is four steps worse than you’d fear it could possibly be.  I’m not going to describe it.  But here I am, having taken a week off to knock that shit off and I’m looking at the better part of a clean hardwood floor and it’s satisfying in a way I hadn’t accounted for.

While rolling it over in my head I remembered something from The Tipping Point about the NYC cleanup effort in the 80s and early 90s.  The aesthetics changed people’s behavior remarkably.  Get rid of the graffiti in the subways, crime went down precipitously.

And while it makes sense that there’s a correlation, if not a causal relationship, at the micro level, I’d never really given it much thought.

Previously the state of my apartment caused me to come in at night, put my stuff down…wherever, go sit in front of the computer and put my back to it.  But always I was conscious of the mess behind me, encroaching further and further on what little space I’d salvaged for myself.

It’s always seemed such an intractably immense undertaking.

We’ll see.

I’ve been saying for the last 7 or so years that I don’t have a television. In the terms people hear it, it’s true; though technically, until about 20 minutes ago I did indeed have a 29 inch CRT from the mid 80’s. It was sitting in a box, packed since I’d moved in to this apartment all those years ago.

Just now I brought it, box and all, down the four flights of stairs and kicked that biotech to the curb. Then went my old 21″ crt monitor (great dell monitor. If you’re on Henry street in Brooklyn between Joralemon and State streets, you’ll find them both if you act now.)

I’m taking a little break to eat one of those Jamaican hot pocket thingies and read some mail before I take my stereo down, and the free-standing air conditioner, the file cabinet, a computer (maybe two.) Then I can step back a sec and think about my next steps.

There are boxes to be cut down, bags of garbage and recycling to be…bagged and brought down.

Hell, I even bought a push-broom.

The goal today I think is to get most of the major crap from the living room dumped.

I don’t even want to talk about the bedroom and the bathroom is off limits. Hell, I don’t even have BEFORE pictures of the bathroom.

UPDATE: Not an hour. Not ONE HOUR after I put the TV, the monitor, one computer and a filing cabinet down stairs I came back down stairs and it was gone, but for the box the TV was in. People are funny.