The Joy of Leaving Your Sh*t All Over the Place

by Jennifer McCartney

  Then, rest comfortably, knowing that if you ever get famous, some screenwriter in 2087 is going to buy access to all your online searches and social media accounts to help them research your biopic. That Chopin had a foot fetish is something we might know if there had been Google back in the early 1800s. From this point forward, everyone in the future will have the ability to know everything about us. Forget your memoir that carefully examines your inner life, using the metaphor of a wisteria that grew in your front yard that was planted by your grandmother. Years from now, voyeurs will scroll through your search history and emails and photos and know the real, unfiltered you. Now, if that isn’t a relaxing thought, you’re not doing life correctly.

  Quiz

  find your email clutter style

  How many unread emails do you have in your inbox?

  A. more than 2,000

  B. none

  If you answered A: you subscribe to a lot of mailing lists and don’t answer or open all your emails in what society deems to be a timely fashion. Accept that you’re never going to answer all the email you want in an appropriate amount of time and with the appropriate level of effort. Lots of emails means you’re popular, so you definitely won’t end up alone—you’ve got Madewell and Sephora for friends!

  If you answered B: you answer or delete or sort all your emails. Good for you, I guess. You probably could have skipped reading this section, but you seem like the kind of person who likes to be thorough.

  6.

  Cherish your stuff but do not hoard

  “And happy always was it for that son, whose father for his hoarding went to hell.”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  While other books endorse a militant attitude toward cleanliness (those authors would prefer it if you lived in a hypo-allergenic white box and owned four pairs of white leotards), messiness is a fine art. Done right, it’s beautiful. Once you’ve tipped the scales from messiness and clutter into hoarding, though, you’ve got a problem. Look, your dad isn’t going to hell if he’s a hoarder, and neither will you, probably. But hoarding is a serious thing that could signify some bigger issues and also get you on television. Hopefully while you’re still alive, but maybe after you’re dead.

  Have you heard of the Collyer brothers? They’re the famous reclusive brothers who accumulated over 140 tons of stuff in their Harlem brownstone. One brother was crushed to death under a mountain of debris and the other starved after his brother died. Here are some things that were removed from the house after their bodies were discovered:

  • pickled human organs

  • 25,000 books

  • eight live cats

  • a car

  • fourteen pianos

  • “old food”

  Hopefully, from the above list you’ve intuited the difference between clutter and hoarding.

  Hoarding is reality-television level insanity. Hoarding is when you buy 40 egg timers at the dollar store and leave them in the bag with the tags on, then put the bag on your couch, and repeat until no one can find your body when you die because it’s under a pile of egg timers and New Yorker mags from 2005 and the bodies of your parakeets and the instruction manual to your Roomba that died from frustration. Actually, fuck it. That house sounds awesome. There are probably only a few things you should ever throw away. Things like:

  • food that’s past its expiration date

  • used cat litter

  • empty bottles of shampoo or conditioner

  • plants that have died

  • pickled organs

  • anything that was alive and is now dead

  Quiz

  how to tell if you’re messy or a hoarder

  1. Are there any rotting fruits in your living room?

  A. yes, but they are the pumpkins I bought and meant to carve for Halloween. Now I’m definitely going to make them into pumpkin bread.

  B. yes, but they are the pumpkins I carved for Halloween, so they’re more folk art than rotting fruit.

  C. yes, but my rotten fruit is in the fruit bowl where it belongs.

  2. How many cats do you own?

  A. 10

  B. I’m not exactly sure, some are in the house in Vail and some are in the apartment in Rome.

  C. 2

  3. Which item is most likely to be found in your car’s glove compartment?

  A. sausages

  B. box of crayons that's been melted into beautiful artifact

  C. tissues, mostly unused

  Answer Key:

  Mostly As: Hoarder. Hoarding perishable items is gross, and it means that mold spores and other stuff are in your air and you’re breathing them. Pure messiness is an art, not a health hazard. Keep your shit in check.

  Mostly Bs: You’re trying. Folk art is an acceptable excuse for keeping literally anything.

  Mostly Cs: Not a hoarder. See page 110.

  Shopping is fun

  Not a hoarder? Cool, go get some more stuff. Accumulating things is an essential and healthy stage of life, if you’re lucky. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, step three involves the need for “love and belonging.” Or, what he probably meant: Love and Belongings. In other words, in your quest toward enlightenment, you gotta have some stuff first. You’ll never reach the mountaintop otherwise.

  Your stuff journey probably looks like this:

  • You move out on your own with a borrowed suitcase and your Mickey Mouse alarm clock and your shitty Chat Toulouse/Gustav Klimt/Kurt Cobain posters.

  • You get a job at a tech startup or as a waitress or working as a secretary in a doctor’s office, and soon you’ve got money to buy a second-hand sofa and exchange your posters for some framed art.

  • Maybe you move in with someone you love or who is just okay and get married and you get some new dishes or hand towels as gifts. This is long before you start Googling the phrase, “Why did I get married?” (Blame society, son!)

  • You buy an apartment or house. You fill it with stuff.

  • You buy a dog or cat and dress it up in tiny coats.

  • You birth a baby and buy the baby stuff.

  • Your parents downsize their house and you take a shit ton of stuff from them, like an old lamp you’ve always loved and 40 boxes of your childhood things they were storing in their basement, and a few china figurines.

  • Pretty soon you’re looking at downsizing your own house because the kids are grown and the stairs are a problem and wouldn’t it be nice to own a condo in Clearwater instead of shoveling snow every winter like an asshole?

  Anyway—let’s get back to that earlier stage in life where you’re getting more stuff. The Love and Belongings stage. This is literally the best stage of your life. Don’t ruin it by embracing some bullshit minimalist fad. There are many people who never even reach this stage, people without the opportunity to continually accumulate things—people who have struggled with homelessness or refugees who’ve had to leave everything behind. My aunt was working as a nurse in Nigeria when the civil war broke out in 1967. She and her new husband had to flee the country with just one suitcase each—she chose to take her wedding album. Luckily they’re still married and she’s not berating herself for taking the photos and leaving behind her collection of gold bullion or whatever. You owe it to her to buy more stuff online.

  So first, be grateful for what you already have and the fact that your new pair of sneakers is a small step on the path to enlightenment. What do you own that is fucking awesome? What about the edgy ink sketch of a penis you got framed? Vampy lipstick in a gold case you only wear when you’re shitfaced? A pair of socks with little sushis on them? Stolen silverware or pint glasses for your collection? We like having things, and we like getting more things. And that’s okay! You’re not an evil consumerist sheep. You’re just a guy or gal who likes the look of that vintage sweater and who thinks it might be nice to own. Look, it’s 10 bucks. A pretty good deal. Try enjoy the experience of purchasing that sweater and let go of the guilt associated wit
h knowing that you have a shit ton of sweaters already. So what? You like and want this one. A good way to tell if you should buy something is to ask yourself: Do I want it? If the answer is yes, then buy it. Whatever it is. Life is short and you’ve earned it. You’re a nice person, probably, just doing your best. Make things a little easier on yourself and buy some shit you don’t need. You’re welcome! Even better, once you’ve mastered this stage of life, the next stage is all about bins full of puppies.

  In conclusion

  “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  By now you’ve realized that throwing out all your belongings isn’t a viable way to properly be alive. Even if you got rid of 90 percent of your belongings, your house isn’t going to be “clean” or tidy, even if some utter cock of a book tells you so. If you’ve ever moved from one place to another you can visualize what I mean. The movers (a.k.a. your friends you’re paying in beer who secretly hate you right now) leave, and your place is still somehow filled with stuff—old extension cords, paperclips, dust bunnies, the warranty booklet for the microwave—bits of debris and detritus from the life of the house. It’s like your suitcase after you’ve been on vacation a few days. A little clothing bomb went off and fucked your shit up into wrinkled piles while you were out rubbing up on your scuba instructor in the hotel hot tub. Whatever. You were way too busy enjoying unlimited frozen rum cocktails from the pool bar to put your shit in hotel drawers that probably had bedbugs anyway.

  I understand the appeal of throwing stuff away and getting back to basics. I get it. There’s a reason people take vacations in geo domes in the California desert that run on solar power and contain only the necessities so they can then Instagram it insufferably. It’s nice to get away from it all and not worry about tidying and concern yourself only with the latest cougar sighting while watching for aliens. It’s trendy to be minimalist these days. But escaping our homes is not the answer, nor is throwing stuff away. It’s about living now with what we have and giving ourselves permission to be messy, slightly untidy, busy-as-fuck normal human beings.

  Take a moment now to congratulate yourself on getting this far. In life. You’re alive and reading and/or skimming a book. Not bad. Not a terrible place to be at the moment. You’re as close as you’ve ever been to living a fuller and more exciting life where something like skydiving or buying a 60-dollar candle no longer sounds so crazy. I can’t make you love your mess any more than someone can make you tidy by telling you to give away all your shit. No one can make you do anything you don’t want to do, really. Although if you read up on MKUltra and the US government experiments with mind control, it’s a super interesting thing to consider. The Unabomber, for example, was a volunteer at Harvard for a secret sociological study on mind control funded by the military. So was Whitey Bulger. If that sounds too Jesse Ventura or the-earth-is-flat for you, look that shit up. You have time, now that you’re not freaking out about tidying anymore. The point is, it’s up to you to stop giving a fuck. Unless it isn’t. Maybe I’m in the employ of the Federal Shopping Consortium and this whole book is designed to make you buy things to help stimulate the economy, like when George W. Bush told everyone to go shopping after 9/11. Maybe all those other authors encouraging you to throw stuff away and live frugally are on some kind of government list of anti-capitalist communist agitators. We’ll never know. We do know that to live your best life you should buy a bunch of copies of this book for your friends. Have more. Store it on the floor. Break FREE.

  Resources

  The acquiring of more stuff is a wonderful, fulfilling journey. Here are some places to help get you started:

  ETSY

  This is a big one. Support artists around the world by purchasing cement soap dispensers, copper cocktail shakers, macramé wall hangings, natural deodorant, and literally anything else people can make with their hands.

  BOOKSTORES

  These are great, even if you’re not super into reading, because these days bookstores stock everything from onesies (My Mommy Loves Jane Austen) to mugs to candles to blankets. For this reason, they’re a great one-stop shop for last-minute birthday gifts. Grab some book-themed home goods (bookends in the shape of the letters A and Z, for example) along with the latest book of cat poetry, and show your friends you love them.

  EBAY

  This is basically like the world’s biggest garage sale. Hey, I love this slightly used purse. Would you take three dollars for it? No? Four? Five? This is a good way to spend your entire day at work. Just bidding on various items you definitely need while answering one out of seven work emails to let people know you’re at your desk but super busy.

  ONLINE RETAILERS

  People get all butt-hurt about these sites because they’re killing mom-and-pop stores and the workers are all paid two dollars an hour with no bathroom breaks. But people shop at them because they can buy their shampoo, a new microfiber couch, cat food, a cruise-appropriate maxi dress, and four hundred adult coloring books and have that shit at their house two days later. Sorry, other stores.

  Clutter checklist

  Here’s a handy checklist to consult to ensure you’re maximizing your clutter potential. Any one of these items in your home or workspace shows you’re on the right track.

  Die-cut Post-it notes in the shape of hearts, cats, or arrows

  Mug that says “I Have the Same Number of Seconds in the Day as Beyoncé”

  Gold letterpress poster that says HUSTLE

  Wine charms

  Terrarium

  Spider plant

  Stones from a beach that you collected on vacation somewhere warm

  Recycled bourbon bottle used as a vase

  Cheese knife

  Bike helmet

  Four or more vibrators

  Water gun for spraying the cats or ferrets when they’re bad

  Dried flowers from prom or wedding

  One item of jewelry you will never wear but it belonged to a relative and has sentimental value

  A tie clip or belt buckle owned by your grandfather

  A china plate owned by your grandmother

  A small doll made out of cat lint

  High heels you can’t wear anymore because of your back issues

  A hot pair of shoes that don’t fit and give you blisters

  More than four books you haven’t read but have owned for more than a year

  An old-timey analog radio

  More than two throw pillows

  A ceramic object in the shape of something like a house or a tulip

  A beer stein you got in Germany

  A pint glass you stole from a bar

  A container full of spare change

  Comic books that will definitely let you retire early when you sell them

  A drawer just for stationery

  A Christmas ornament from your childhood

  Seasonal lip gloss or lipstick (plum for fall, red for winter, pink for spring, coral for summer)

  A chalkboard or anything covered in chalkboard paint

  A craft made out of a mason jar (congrats on your Pinterest account)

  More than four remote controls with a million buttons that make no sense. Wasn’t everything supposed to be voice activated by now? The future has really let us all down.

  A drawer of USB cables and old cellphones

  A fridge covered in wedding invitations, baby photos, and coupons along with 10 or more novelty magnets

  A box of art supplies filled with pencil crayons, oil pastels, water colors, sketchbooks, and paintbrushes for your once-a-year "I'm going to be more creative" phase

  A set of weights in red, turquoise, or pink

  acknowledgments

  Thanks to my editor Ann Treistman and to Sarah Bennett at The Countryman Press. Thanks to everyone in marketing, sales, and publicity at W. W. Norton. Thanks, booze.

  Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer McCa
rtney

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, The Countryman Press, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

  The Countryman Press

  www.countrymanpress.com

  A division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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  978-1-58157-387-9

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