The first step is likely movement.

Okay, so I’ve just had a great throwaway. The first of many that need to happen.

Background and context? Possibly TMI, but whatevs.

So I’m not a nester. In fact, I suspect most men aren’t. Which is to say that I don’t actually want to spend much time thinking about my environment. Is it generally tidy? Do I know where everything is? Is anything in the way? Is it sufficiently warm, or sufficiently cool, to sustain life? Is there a space to work?

If yes to all of the above, we’re good.

However, I’m not just a man, I’m a divorced man.

My ex-wife, like many women, I think, was a nester. Which is to say that for her, the first task in any living space is to fill all of the nooks and crannies with cutenesses. By that I mean:

• Twee tchotchkes that look like something other than what they are (a basket that looks like a bird, spoon that looks like a basket, a wine glass that looks like a spoon, that sort of thing)

• Seasonal everything (salad plates for arbor day, butter dish for Christmastime, pumpkin silverware for Hallowe’en, that sort of thing)

• Accessories for accessories (a lace mat to go under the woven mat to go under the holiday dish to go under the holiday candy bowl, that sort of thing)

• Random stuff that I don’t really even understand (a hunk of wood, partially finished, with some sort of stand on it, shaped in abstract ways, that stands in the corner, that sort of thing)

I think most nesters do this thing where there is a constant inflow and outflow of things, i.e. there is always a stream of things going out (to friends, to charity, to the thrift store) to make way for a constant stream of new things coming in, and at the same time, there is a constant rotation of things, i.e. the New Year flower vase gets swapped for the Valentine’s Day flower vase, and then for the St. Patrick’s Day flower vase, and then for… etc.

So when there’s a nester around, the space is absolutely packed with stuff that isn’t particularly utilitarian, and more of it than any single person needs, but it is also very dynamic in that the huge library of stuff is never the same from one year to the next. Nesters invest a huge amount of their time (from my perspective at least) on maintaining this inflow, outflow, and rotation in an overpacked environment, and through this labor, manage to keep the environment looking “cute and homey” rather than just cluttered. But it is an active job that must be done continuously.

— § —

So now let’s add divorce into the mix.

Couple gets divorced. Man is not the nester (this is me), woman who’s the nester goes off to found a new house and begins nesting all over again with entirely new stuff.

What’s left in the man’s space in this scenario is a snapshot of the nesting universe, i.e. a densely packed wilderness of cabinets and drawers and containers and indeed rooms full of said twee tchotchkes, seasonal everythings, accessories for accessories, and random stuff that he doesn’t understand. And—note that this is the important part—he is not a nester, doesn’t care to engage in that labor of inflow, outflow, rotation, and organization, and more to the point, doesn’t even understand how to do it and couldn’t if he wanted to.

This is how we arrive at one of the regrets that I have about my life over the last eight years: I live in a house absolutely packed full of stuff that I only marginally recognize and never, ever use.

After my divorce, I just packed most of it away into already burgeoning closets and I haven’t done much with it. Part of the problem is that from a guy’s perspective, a lot of it is perfectly good… something. That is to say, all of those wine glasses are perfectly good wine glasses even if I don’t drink wine, and all of those seasonal dishes will in fact hold stuff and aren’t damaged, even if I never put them out, and that oven mitt shaped like a poinsettia is a perfectly intact oven mitt, though I don’t prefer it because it’s a weird shape, so it feels sort of wasteful to just discard it, but I really don’t have any interest in distributing to family and friends and charities and thrift stores and…

…and so there has been this whole universe of stuff I don’t care about and don’t use now gathering dust and (more importantly) representing a huge usurper of space and a huge clutter problem always threatening to break out as I try to navigate around it (guy perspective: a tool belongs in a cabinet and when I open said cabinet I just want to remove said tool and close cabinet again, it’s already an irritation that for some reason I have to first remove the stacks of unused decorative items that are in the way to get it out, and I’m in far too much of a hurry to fix something with said tool to immediately try to get them all back in there in organized fashion, I really ought to just throw them away, but it feels so wasteful, as they’re perfectly intact somethings-or-other…)

— § —

I have just had a big throwaway and it’s great. I threw a whole bunch of perfectly good wine glasses, decorative items, vases, baskets, dishes, whatever into the bin. They clanged and shattered and I did feel vaguely bad that I was destroying them and think to myself “you really ought to have taken these to the thrift store” but the fact is that I won’t; if I tell myself I’m going to do that they will either end up back in the cabinet in a week or they will first end up on the kitchen floor for a week, and then in the back of the car for two months, and then back on the kitchen floor for another month and then back into the cabinet in worse order than they were to start with. So the bin is the only option.

Into the bin they went.

And by God, that cabinet is fixed. I understand it now. It holds things now in a sane way. It doesn’t threaten to spill out into a cluttered mess at the slightest whisper. It’s fan-fscking-tastic.

And so voilà—a tiny bit of momentum, and the first of my New Year’s resolutions.

1. Throw piles and piles of shit away this year. As in, just chuck it out if I don’t use it and will never use it, even if it’s perfectly serviceable. Gleefully waste in productive ways.

— § —

And as I was doing that, I was also musing on other things that keep coming up again and again but for whatever reason do not get done (okay, reason tends to be that they do not generate enough in the way of immediate gains, but we’re far beyond immediate gains, I think, in my life right now). So here are more of the resolutions:

2. Start shooting stock again. This means getting ahold of some more equipment that I’d already let go, which will be painful, but that was a side income stream and a source of interest, activity, and intellectual stimulation that I could use again. Now I’m a dad with older kids, they may even be interested in some of the events, so it’s a two-fer.

3. Get the novel back on track. There is a novel that I’ve “been writing” for about twenty years. In fact, that’s not strictly true as I haven’t worked on it at all in probably twelve to fifteen years, but every time I think about starting to write creatively again I get hung up on the fact that I invested all this time previously in a novel I didn’t even complete yet and so why start another one if I don’t finish these things and so on, so let’s just finish that one for god’s sake.

4. Refresh the blog. One or two people (if that; I flatter myself) may recognize that the basic design, appearance, and nav of the blog here dates to 2017, and even that was actually a resurrection of a previous design from something done in Graymatter way back in 2007 before I was even married. So the current appearance here is like 13 years old. I’ve been hung up on the thought that I ought to get with the times and go to Substack or YouTube or whatever, but let’s be honest, I’m not going to—and probably shouldn’t as then anything I produce may in fact disappear without warning in the vagaries of corporate life. So—decision made. Blog it is. But when I log in here, the bones need to be now and not some ancient me that no longer exists. I need to feel like I’m posting in a blog and not visiting an archive.

So this is all incredibly boring and TMI if you’re not me, but let’s be honest, that was the whole point of blogs in the first place way back in the day, and this one started in 1999 and by God I’ve decided I’m going to lose the precious concern about whether or not I’m with the times and just continue doing what I set out to do here which was to write stuff to the universe and if someone happens to see, fine.

— § —

Okay, I feel good after today’s posting. I feel—dare I say it—a tiny budding bit, just the tiniest hint, just a faint seed—of possible momentum.