Profanity. It has a kind of allure to it, even though you know that using is it crass, and often uncalled for. Yet there’s no getting around it. Sometimes ‘gosh darn it’ is not enough.

I know this because of my childhood growing up around middle class folks with cable who didn’t skimp on the swear words.

By the time I was six, I had an incredibly advanced vocabulary of curse words. I imagine I was not alone in this. It seems that where I grew up, profanity and birdsong were heard in equal measures. I know my father was proficient in it though my mother was less so, and my best friend had a father who was a Marine, so Jeff’s house was a cornucopia of knowledge in regards to picking up interesting turns of phrase.

Yet, somehow, our parents had sheltered us from the biggest of the big, the most profane of all words. And we would have not had an inkling about it if in 1983 ‘A Christmas Story’ wasn’t released.

Sometime in 1984 or 1985, my family sat huddled around our VCR and CRT television set  – a massive Sylvania with numerical input instead of the knobs for standard and UHF on the old black and white television.  And as we watched the misadventures of Ralphie and his family, we came to the classic scene that everyone remembers. Ralphie’s father blows a tire and in the process, Ralphie tips his hand that he knows a word he ought not. The word. The queen mother of dirty words. The F- – – word.

Mom and dad tried not to make a big deal out of it, and I can’t remember whether or not I asked them directly what the word was. But, what I do remember is asking my older sister. I don’t know why – my sister and I had gone well into the territory where we had discovered we didn’t like each other very much at the time. But, ask her I did, and there was a long conversation that resulted. Most of this conversation was me begging to know what the word was. Her part was a steady repetition of the word ‘no’ which did not start with the letter F and did not have four letters. I had to pester her for what seemed like hours, though when you’re six years old, time has a sense of drawing itself out. I’ll give my sis credit – she was wise not to tell me. Even at six-years old, I knew I could probably recreate the scene and make sure that like Schwartz, she’d pay a steeper fine than I would for popping that word out in front of my parents.

Time passed.

After school ended in 1987 my family took our summer trip to the Delaware shore. We’d decided to stay in Rehoboth that summer, and mom and dad were trying to choose a movie we could all see at the Atlantic. It was not to be though. Mom, dad, my sister, and myself could not agree. I forget what mom and dad went to see, but my sister and I were allotted enough money for two tickets to see Spaceballs. Mom was very concerned. The film was PG-13, and she wasn’t sure it was appropriate. Dad must have made reassurances though, because a couple minutes later we were enjoying the film immensely. It was Star Wars, but funny, and while I didn’t get all of the jokes, I got enough. Dick jokes are the kind of thing little boys pick up early. I didn’t get the joke behind Dot Matrix and Prince Valium – though apparently my sister did.

As we arrived at the end of the film, we reached the threshold. The Spaceballs were in Mega Maid, desperately trying to reverse the self destruct sequence. They were trying everything. And eventually they remember there’s a self destruct cancellation button. Dark Helmet flips up the panel for it and there’s a sign reading ‘out of order.’

And out came the word.

My sister immediately sees my eyes go dark with confusion. She turns to me and says ‘‘That’s the word.’ It was as if we both instantly resumed the conversation from the prior year seamlessly, in the way siblings frequently can. My eyes went wide. I now possessed the secret knowledge – and I’d not be able to use it as leverage against my sister, who had by then become my archnemesis (don’t worry – we’re okay now. Especially with two thirds of a continent between us).

But, I had the word. And there’s nothing more motivated than a child with forbidden knowledge.

And though I knew the word, I only knew its form, its shape, its sound. I had no context to use it other than as exclamation at its time of revelation. I wouldn’t learn the versatility of the word, it’s truest usage, or even when it would actually be appropriate to use that word until later. Looking back on it, it opened up a whole bunch of other words that in turn used that one at their respective roots (it’s a hell of a malleable word). And I’ll admit it: there’s probably few days that roll by that I don’t either say it, or print it in my work.  For a word as charged as it is, it’s a common part of my day here in America where tempers run hot and the internet spews profanity faster than any cable channel of my youth. It doesn’t even seem charged or dangerous anymore, though I’m careful (or I try to be) about using it around children.

You know, kids like me at at that young age when I grasped the use of the cutting edge of advanced eight-year old vocabulary.

I suppose there are not bad words – just different ones for different occasions. And probably age groups.

Either way, my vocabulary got advanced.

 

I spent a good amount of time tonight trying to make this portion of a chapter a bit cleaner. It is mostly exposition – but I’ve not felt a way to introduce Kwon and his home in the Slums yet. Perhaps I’ll hack it up into an encounter. The whole ‘show rather than tell’ route. Regardless, I think it still turned out well.

—

Home was an abandoned warehouse complex on a formerly busy dock. The region had already given way to newer and larger construction upshore before the repatriation of the North. Once the trickle of refugees transformed into a flood as a result of the plagues and starvation and occupation of the former DPRK, the place had quickly been partitioned into smaller and smaller dwellings while separate Kondoleuui Dumong – the Vulture Lords of former Russia and the more opportunistic Chinese – mimicked their southern slum-dwelling counterparts, tearing land away from ineffective UN ‘peacekeepers.’ Kwon paced through the separate stalls that passed for housing, mostly partitioned by nothing more than thick plastic tarp and the occasional corrugated metal sheet that could be scavenged. As one of the first families to arrive in the district, his parents had lucked out. There was an administrative office in the warehouse that looked too squalid to live in at the time his family first laid eyes on it. But, with some effort, he and his father had made it work. The space was cramped and confined – but it had access to power when it was working, and there was lockable storage in the form of older filing cabinets left from the paper age.

It was not much, but it had a door that could lock, and there was enough space for he and his father now that his mother had gone.

“Father,” Kwon said, returning home. “I am back.”

There was a low moan from a corner where Kwon the Elder sat, obviously drunk, reeking of cheap Soju and stale sweat. Par for the course. He’d spent the majority of his time that way since his mother had left.

Kwon did not waste any further time on his father. If he was nearly passed out drunk it was better than him being only half drunk and asking him to ‘give him what was owed.’ In the beginning, Kwon had given him money under the guise that the landlord would then take the money from his father. But, as Soju bottles began to pile up and the landlord became more and more agitated, Kwon cut the middleman out. His father could not be trusted so much as to reliably pay rent.

“You know, boy,” his father slurred. “I used to own warehouses like this.”

Kwon didn’t look at him as he set aside his satchel and his beaten RealSim hat. He heard the sky open up somewhere above him, the roof of the hollow warehouse space echoing the drenching sheets of rain. It was like the sound of coins being flung against metal.

I suppose that’s what brought him around, Kwon thought. Maybe he thought someone started tossing out Won.

He hated that thought. His father had been a good man before the North had collapsed in on itself and the fighting had begun anew and new boundaries were drawn. His father was a broken shell now. Nothing of the man he’d looked up to clung to the shattered remnants of him.

“I know, father.”

“Where… when is your mother coming home?”

“Tomorrow.” The lie came easy. It was easier to lie when Kwon the Elder was in his cups.

There was an incoherent mutter as his father sunk back into his drunken slumber. Soon, Kwon heard only the sound of the rain, and his father snoring softly. He prepared his pallet, little more than a foam bedroll and a flimsy blanket, a blanket that would not be needed on a night like tonight. While the warehouse provided shelter, the heat of the day simply pooled into the concrete and metal of the old structure and did not release it until the brutal winters came. The turn of the seasons were a reminder to him that only lack was consistent in Dogtown. The kind of lack changed, but underneath it, the hurt and want of the slum was insatiable and constant.

As he undressed and prepared to bed down, he looked at his father, half out of his chair, still snoring. He couldn’t possibly be comfortable.

He stood up and approached his father. “Father. You should sleep. Come to your pallet. You will be sore in the morning.”

His father only woke up for the briefest of instants, but it was enough for Kwon to get his father clumsily to his rat-like nest of cloth scraps and bedroll. Once Kwon had him in position, the man was solidly, blacked out.

“Good night, father.”

Kwon locked the door and curled into his pallet.

Sometimes I find myself exactly where I’m supposed to be.

I’m not a professional photographer. But, I’m told I do good work in the moment. I lend it to two factors – basic composition, and being in the right place at the right time.

I love modern smartphones. I don’t carry expensive cameras any longer. I have all of the megapixels I need on me at any given time. I don’t need to play with RAW, I don’t have a need for any specialty lenses. I’m just getting what I can, when I can. And it’s a good feeling.

Sometimes I get to that place in my chosen disciplines – namely illustration and writing. I don’t imagine I’m the only creative that this happens to, but creativity for me is not like a spigot. I don’t turn the faucet knobs on and have the creativity pour out. Sometimes, I need to be in the right place and the right time. Much like my photos.

But, I’m hoping with repeated visits here that I can train the faucet to be a little more cooperative.

I wrestle with my spirituality daily.

I don’t know if I’m unique in this or not. I know I had a fairly common upbringing when it comes to faith in America. I grew up Christian, specifically Lutheran. We went to a church that was right up the road. We could walk there if we were feeling spry. It was a good sized congregation. There were a lot of neighbors and familiar faces. I knew I was supposed to feel safe there. We didn’t do a lot of reading from scripture in the early years, the pastor put the ideas in my sister’s and I’s heads for us. We both grew up knowing there was a very nice fellow named Jesus that was god’s son and that he sacrificed everything so that we could get a life after death. He told us that we ought to be nice to people because it’s the right thing to do, and that even when bad stuff happened we could take comfort in knowing he would always be there for us.

Once I was about ten, something didn’t seem right.

A lot of the off feelings came from the other people in the congregation. A lot of them just didn’t really treat me very nicely. I was used to kids treating me poorly. I was kind of enthusiastically awkward, I was always a little on the heavy side as a kid, and I was bookish and nerdy. So it didn’t surprise me that sometimes the other kids were mean. Little kids are just mean sometimes. They haven’t got empathy entirely figured out yet. But, what I really couldn’t understand was the adults. They didn’t seem to like each other all that much either and would engage in the same meanness. Though I couldn’t identify it as such at a young age, I was seeing politics going on. I don’t know if it’s a Lutheran thing or not, but there were always committees and chairpeople for things, and in retrospect there was an intense amount of jockeying for status and position between a few prominent families in the local church.

I got a little older, and then I started seeing some of the things there for what they were in my spiritual life. I remember being told about Christ’s humility, about God being there when I needed him. I remembered that Jesus accepted all comers regardless of their status – all were supposed to be welcome.

But… I did not feel particularly welcome. I did not feel that I belonged.

I remember families seemed to look at my family with mild disdain at times, though they masked it with a kind of politeness that we all come to adopt when having to be nice to people we don’t particularly want to be nice to. I think this was, again, possibly some politics at play as Mom and Dad had once been very enthusiastic about church participation and being an active part of the congregation before having two kids. The congregation seemed to have a constant game of who was on top, who was the most devoted to Christ, like it was some kind of competition and some of them seemed to like letting others, like my parents, know when they were on the outs. Others looked down on us when our Sunday best was not perhaps up to their Sunday best, despite Jesus having preached to people in rags who had nothing. Yet others still looked at us as lesser than they because we did not attend services regularly, which was to say every Sunday. My parents were very fond of the Gospel of Thomas. A church was a building. You could pray in private whenever it was convenient, and God was there to listen on the other six days as much as he was any one day in particular. Given that kind of attention span, surely he could have set things to rights with our congregation – yet he didn’t. Questioning His will I knew was equally as bad, so I learned not to do it when other people were watching – including my family.

I do not suspect all churches were like this, but I also don’t believe this kind of thing is uncommon either. It colored my perception of organized religion (and continues to). It had a set of scriptures that people seemed to practice to their level of comfort. Despite having a common playbook in the form of the Bible, people seemed to pick and choose which parts would apply, ignore it wholesale when it was convenient, or slavishly devote themselves to every last word, even the parts that seem totally crazy.

None of that sat right with me. I was old enough to start grasping the concept of hypocrisy by then.

Then, I started to learn in earnest about the other worlds and communities outside of my own. My father took me abroad one summer. I went to see other parts of the world, both regionally and globally. I gained new perspectives. I learned about other faiths. I learned about philosophy. Philosophy was a big one. When I hit upon Taoism, I finally felt there was something I could understand. I could grok this. It made sense. I started to question the teachings I grew up with.

In 1997, my grandmother died. She  was like another mother, and was the closest family tie I had outside of immediate family or my cousins. I felt something snap and go limp inside when the end finally came after several grueling months of her being confined in a nursing facility. Much like when I was four and my childhood friend’s mother died – whom was also like another mother – I took no comfort in things like ‘Heaven needed another angel’ or ‘It was her time’ or ‘She’s in a better place now.’ The words were rote things to say to patch over the pain. They didn’t make me feel any better. I was shaken to my core.

The only thing that felt like it did any good was a secular thought: ‘The pain is over now.’ It was for her at any rate. The rest of us would have to soldier on. Nothing to it but to do it. And the scars healed. After the funeral. I was done with the church in all of its modes. I decided that my faith in Christ would have to be personal. I’d never read through the entirety of the bible. I never really felt anything in that building where so called brothers and sisters in Christ were to take all comers and accept and love one another. I felt judged and in a hollow space, a construction of man – not a construction of God.

My faith in my teachings though wholly collapsed a few months later when I saw a homeless man on 20th and Race atop a steam vent. He was filthy. You could see in his face that he had been strung out on something, his lips chapped and ashen, his skin little better, sores around rough patches of scaly skin, hiding beneath layers of decomposing rags. Shoeless, emaciated, and tucked in the fetal position, I could not tell if he was alive or dead.

And in that moment, I tightened my own jacket – far too warm and claustrophobic – and walked away.

I walked away.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. We all do this. We all ignore it. We can’t just fix  all the wrongs we see up close and personal in this world. Because actually fixing it is damned near impossible. I realized that even if I did anything for this man, if I was willing to help, to call a cop, to try and give him some comfort at my own expense, it would be a temporary fix at best. I did not have the faith that even if I had done something about it that day that someone else would do the same thing for him the next day or the day after that. I was unwilling to take this man, stand him up and say ‘Come with me, I’ll help’ without fear for my safety. There was no faith left inside of me, not for the guy on the street, in myself, or in some absentee god who had not done this man before me any favors. The thing inside of me that went limp completely after my grandmother’s passing dried up and swirled away in a bitter gust of Philadelphia wind. Later, in my apartment after many tears, I remember thinking to myself, ‘It’s okay, you’ll pick it up later. If there is a God, he’s supposed to forgive. One day, I will return as the prodigal son. I will be accepted.’

I haven’t tried going back to the Lutheran Church since, nor have I uttered a sincere Christian prayer.

But that’s a shitty ending, isn’t it? Nineteen, alone on the streets of Philadelphia in the bitter cold, feeling that last brittle twig of faith snapping. An empty vessel just eking out a life.

Well, you’ll perhaps be pleased to know that ten years later, I would feel something again, though the source may not come from where you expected.

I drifted. I began to lean a bit more on philosophy than religion. I decided to move around in different circles. I found myself in college. I let the world sort itself while I tried to figure myself out. It took some doing. The hits kept coming. Debt from college. A shitty warehouse job. Disillusionment with my chosen profession in the arts; or lack there of beyond doing work for people who looked at me as some kind of subhuman because artists were scum without any real value, interchangeable with forklifts or autodialers. Getting downsized – twice. I worked retail at Christmas. But, I had my friends, I had my family, I had my diversions. Things varied from day to day. Good and bad. I thought maybe I’d figured it out.

Then I suffered a major trauma. Where in my past I thought I saw a man possibly dead in the street, in 2005 one of my best friends collapsed in front of me in mid-conversation, dying shortly thereafter despite efforts of the people with us who tried to save him. My mind shattered. I was not well for several months, and only after intense amounts of external assistance did I get back to something that looked like me, talked like me, and could function.

But, I was still broken inside. A little hollow space was there where I once had faith that everything happened for reasons, that we were protected on high by a righteous God who righted wrongs and set bent things straight. There was a cross shaped hole in my soul. Even if you give up on one creed, the absence can still gnaw at you, and you may yearn for another to provide meaning.

In May of 2007, I had saved up a lot of money. All told about four grand. I’d decided I was going to see more of the world. I cashed bonds from my grandmother, saved up $200 a check (easier to do when I could still work within my parent’s insurance and had no car payments) over the course of a few years. I was going to go to Japan.  I booked travel through AAA, boarded a United flight to O’Hare, then to Narita.

After a night of exploring Shinjuku-ku, I woke the next day, got on a bus with the tour group and we went out to the Meiji Shrine in Shibuya Tokyo.

Our tour guide, an older woman named Kyoko, explained to us the expectations of us in the temple. She told us about the ritual of washing hands and mouth, how to make proper obeisance to the Kami spirits. She told us about Inari, the rice goddess and what the folded paper streamers meant and about bound trees that were spiritually married to one another. It was all rather alien stuff to me as a Westerner, and I can’t say I put much initial thought into it. But, as we began to approach, passing Sake barrels and wishing trees, that started to change.

We approached a Torii gate that led to the main shrine. It was massive; thirty-feet tall and made from actual, whole trees. It was huge, but plainly decorated. I even stopped to snap a picture.

Kyoko told us (and I’m paraphrasing here) that by passing through the gate, it was said that it would start the process of cleansing the spirit, and would block out unclean influences. Perhaps it was the power of suggestion. I can’t objectively say. But, subjectively, something did happen. I felt a breeze as I passed under the arch of the gate, and while I couldn’t instantly put my fingers on it exactly until some time later, I could feel the broken spiritual connections began to repair itself. we approached the purification area of the shrine where we began the ritual gestures that Kyoko had taught us. I took the dipper full of water and washed my hands and poured water into my cupped hand to cleanse my mouth. I bowed and we continued further in.

We spent some time learning about the Shrine, but then caught a fleeting glimpse of the shrine maidens and priests on their way to perform ceremonies in the off-limits parts of the shrine.

In that moment I felt a little better, that emptiness inside of me lessening a bit. I had not taken comfort from anything with a spiritual aspect to it like this since perhaps my teens. I did not weep – I did not have to. There was nothing but a simple contentment, a mellow joy.

It was a miracle. Or at least it felt that way to me. I had felt right from the moment I crossed the gate,. I had begun to repair my soul.

I repeated this ritual again and again, as many times as I could. In as many places as I could.

And, eventually, I ended up in Nara.

This shrine I was told was a particularly big deal. It boasts the largest wooden shrine to Buddha in Japan if I remember correctly, and it is visited often by locals and tourists alike. And it was here that I think I finally began to fix myself. If you’re unfamiliar with some of the practices that go on at the shrines of Japan, you’ll find a frequent fixture is a prayer board area. You simply take a blank, slim wooden placard from available stacks, and then you write on it as an offering to the heavens. You  can write for all sorts of things. You write for a good exam grade. You write for the return of health to a loved one. You write to honor a spirit. At the end of each day, the monks come to collect the placards and burn them as an offering to the spirits of the heavens, in hope that the smoke will carry your intent to them.

I took a placard and I took a pen. And I honored a spirit.

I finally wept. But these were not the tears of grief offered so many times before in the memory of my friend, these were tears of hope. I felt like I had finally found a way to honor my deceased comrade in a manner that had some kind of larger spiritual meaning. Thousands of miles from home, I had regained a lost part of my spiritual self. And that part remains still, slowly growing inside of me, expanding beyond that cross shaped void into something that has no edges or boundaries. Something unknowable, and mysterious, like Tao bringing forth ten thousand things. It didn’t matter that Tao was Chinese and Shinto was Japanese and that Buddhism belonged to both. What mattered was that something outside of myself, outside of direct perception, outside of comprehension reached to me, and made straight what was bent. I felt that somewhere in the cosmos, there was something at work. It had recognized me, and my friend, for one brief moment. And that would be enough for me.

It is now seven years later after the trip. And while I still feel the same way about organizational religions, I have faith in whatever force set in motion the actual healing my spirit received. And whatever that spirit is, I take comfort that it moved me.

I still struggle with it though. Every day presents new challenges, new losses, new moments. I can’t know it – I think that matters of the spirit are utterly unknowable and can only be acted on by instinct, a deep unknowing. All I can do is work within it, and hope that it is enough.

 

 

 

The apartment has been thoroughly purged. The last of the big push is over.  I have a few remaining boxes to be hauled to the dumpster and then I think I’m done.

Now, I can see things a little differently. I am not used to a feeling of accomplishment after completing a task like this. This time though I have a feeling like I’m in control of the space. I’ve regained two desks – the one I write at, and the one I draw at. Both are easy to access and appointed well enough to work at them. I managed to produce both a decent drawing of the City of Ygg and to edit seven whole chapters of 2012’s NaNo project. If it continues I may be well on the way through to an ending to Parked if this keeps up.

It’s even managed to hold up versus a small gathering of people! Had full on kitchen madness and still managed to keep things relatively clean. I can still see the dining room table and all of my music is now ready to be sorted and either packed away in storage or sold to the nearby used book store.

Let’s see how long this can run. Because I’m starting to like what I see around here.

The chains of apathy were broken recently. It’s really easy for me to come home, get comfortable, and slide into complacency. For me to just sit on the couch, bring up my Netflix queue and disappear into back to back episodes of House of Cards. Sometimes it’s not Netflix. Sometimes it’s worse. The XBox and my Playstation are equally good – if not more so – at taking my full bandwidth.

Given that, other things in the house tend to get out of hand.

I’m not good at cleaning. I hate keeping up with the Joneses. Every minute I spend scrubbing a toilet, or destroying the copious amount of junk mail I receive, or shredding bank statements, or any of the other tiny little details of everyday life that others do without thinking about it make me feel chained and resentful. Little pockets of entropy begin to form, then they turn into a pile, and those piles turn into heaps. I’m not exactly a hoarder I think. Hoarders keep stuff because they keep stuff. They get attached to stuff that is, in essence, garbage. I’d sooner toss all of my detritus that gathers, I’m just… lazy. I put my effort into stuff that I feel is more important. Writing, being with my girlfriend, hanging out around a table with friends and polyhedral dice, reading. Housework sucks by comparison.

Well, after a while I usually hit a purge cycle. I look at the stuff in my house and try to manage it. Mostly this ‘management’ comes in the form of ‘ordering’ things. Maybe I pack up some stuff to sell to 2nd and Charles. Maybe a token box to Goodwill. But some corners are simply too entrenched. I leave them be. Best to let sleeping dragons lie.

Not this past two weeks though.

My apartment had gotten to be a shit hole. The bathroom was dirty. The kitchen was grungy. I’d been lax with garbage and recycling. It was filthy.

As it is wont to happen, external sources informed me of my squalor. It came as rude awakening and I can’t say it was wholly unexpected. It’s not that I don’t see the tides rising. It’s hard to miss. An entire three lower bookshelves had been lost due to the stacks formed from hastily moving stuff out of the way enough to make living possible. It was becoming difficult to move. Getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom was perilous without light. This and more was pointed out to me and I slowly took in another fact.

I’m in a position in which I will likely be moving in the next year. If all of this stuff is still here, moving is going to be a nightmare.

The Great Purge had come. And I was to be its vessel.

The purge in this case reaffirmed to me that I am not, in fact, a Hoarder. I have been merciless in my expurgation of my clutter. I have found all sorts of stuff that I have had to ask myself ‘why did I keep this?’ I have dumped a lot of old mail and magazines that simply got put into a place called ‘out of sight’ where I could deal with them after I’d had my fill of reading for the day; a strategy doomed to failure since I can read from my arrival home until bedtime – or well after bedtime. I have taken an entire carload of old clothes, VHS tapes I can’t even play anymore, and old housewares to Goodwill. I have traded in many old volumes no longer needed to 2nd and Charles. I have thoroughly cleansed the bathroom, scrubbing sink, toilet, and shower within an inch of their structural integrity. I have removed all of the little tokens and effluvia from the Bar area of the kitchen and made counter space more orderly. I have archived art that was laying haphazardly around the place, and I have freed my long disused art table. Now that everything is off of the places above and the dust has begun to settle, it’s now at the vacuuming stage.

And god help me it’s not done. I still have an entire desk to purge – surfaces and drawers – and while the walk in closet has been ruthlessly organized, half of it is now filled with boxes vacated in the purge itself. These boxes await their purpose to be realized in the coming months when much of what I have will be moved out to storage to accommodate a third person in my living space.

I hate this dance, the constant strain on lower back and shoulder, the sweating, the feeling of dust coating my hands and throat, the kneeling and scrubbing. I started last night around seven and didn’t stop until just short of midnight.

But when I hit the sack last night, I fell into the sleep of the just. Babies don’t sleep that well. And to add to that, I feel this strange surge of accomplishment. Like I’ve done something. I’m not used to feeling good about cleaning. Finishing the act tends to bring thoughts of the next time I’ll have to do this. And yes, I’ve been told if I keep on top of it it won’t be like this, but remember the above – I’d rather be doing anything else than keeping up for sake of appearances.

But, I don’t know. Maybe there’s something to it. The feeling like I have regained control of my living space. To be able to have company over again without having to clear things away for them. Being able to host a dinner at a table that is actually not just another storage area (though it is now – I need a staging area to handle the clutter until this is done).

Time will tell.