Runaway Thoughts

Published June 7, 2021 by Nan Mykel

Crabby (above) is lying down because I can’t figure out how to heist him (he’s currently unattached to anything but gravity). Suggestions welcome. I found him dead and de-gutted him myself in 2019…

If there should be a good God: “please protect the no fly zone in Washington, D.C. better than you did on 9/11…”

While housecleaning I had the horrible thought that I might live another 10 years and suffer from having discarded the many droppings from my past in an anti-hoarding activity. (Smile)

P.S. And by the bye, when I searched Webster’s for the spelling of horde…hoard?…, I saw that the word traces back to the word vulva…And when I first looked up horde it was across the page from the picture of horse, with 35 places on a horse numbered and named…

Things

Published June 6, 2021 by Nan Mykel

They say it isn’t nice

to love things as well as life

but hoarders know that things will stay

when others in their lives go way.

My things all around me pile,

big Mama to the little child.

Old letters calling to my mind,

tales from those who are left behind.

Wise old Yoda looks back at me

as though to say, “It’s me and thee.”

(Nan’s reblog from 2019)

It’s 2021 now and I’m still dealing with “things.” In fact, earlier this month I added a 6 ft x 4 ft painting from the Recycle store down the street, plus purchased a 4-drawer legal size filing cabinet. One of my daughters caught the –quirk…defense…habit…addiction…affliction…from me.

I suspect it relates back to a problem with transitional objects*. For much of my life my transitional objects have been books after the baby blankets disappeared. Hunger, depression, loneliness, a longing to be validated and changing schools all along before I could really practice making friends (11 schools in 12 years prior to 2 universities). The result has been too much of a me-me-me focus. I never heard of a support group for hoarders, but I suspect the world could use one. No, not the world–there are many more refugees with bare bones belongings than self-centered hoarders, or maybe it should be hungry and lonely hoarders.

I don’t think being incested as a child (grammarians would shudder at that misuse of the word) is pertinent to my hoarding. I do suspect that my feelings and thoughts being discounted by my parents is probably the primary culprit. I recall as a very young child cutting a hole in the skirt of my dress. When someone asked me why I did it I said that I didn’t have anything else to do. Then, somewhere I wrote Say It Aint So! (Maybe I blogged it here, too):

Here’s the thing:

I’ve been talking

through this

loudspeaker I

found in my crib

80 years ago and

just now notice

it’s not plugged in!

The old Christmas cards, letters and especially valued articles (on consciousness, imaging, evolution, dreaming, nature, etc.) and even more especially old photos of my immediate family and genealogy on both my parents’ sides and other genealogical records and shells and driftwood, fossils and puppets and 10 shoeboxes of big old-oversized dvds leftover from my volunteer days at Public Access television, plus journals and dreams…you get the idea…

Actually I feel kind of scared at the thought of discarding evidence from my life. I’m scared of depression and boredom, I guess…And perhaps surrounding myself with things is a form of escape from acknowledgement of the inevitable end of things and me.

HOME IS THE WRITER

Published January 23, 2016 by Nan Mykel

My computer desk is not well lit. I don’t know why, unless it’s to keep company with my flailing vision. I know it’s “failing,” but if a writer can’t have a little fun, who can? Surrounding me, floor to ceiling, are remnants of my former craze for genealogy. In the new digital robotic age, nobody cares, not even me. If we should meet ancestors in the sweet by and by we can introduce ourselves, surely!

And my books! They say writers should read, but… three copies of a book because I like it so much?

So much personal history! Who gives a hoot, as the old owl says. My old report cards—with comments from teachers— Mrs. Arvesons’ two A-pluses on my term paper in ninth grade, my National Honor Society certificate from high school and my tennis team letter, not to mention a drawer full of Christmas cards and correspondence from friends and acquaintances for more than 50 years; at least 100 videotapes shot by me for Public Access line my shelves—many shelves. Last week I came across a letter of congratulations for a forensic evaluation I did 25 years ago, which brings me to the question of why am I in two writing groups and maintain a busy blog and volunteer for public access when I need to spend a year dispensing with my junk?

Given my propensity for hoarding, how can I write anything, you might say? Well, it has to do with escaping the melee I have created and continue to create. And oh yeah I forgot to mention my blind deaf cat who requires his sanitary floor sheet changed daily.

After having an earlier computer fine-tuned at Staples, I lost it when I put it on top of my car and drove away. Now I have an hp guaranteed to last a year, most of which has expired. My huge blonde computer desk sits more or less inside a vacant closet, whose doors are stuck under my bed in another room ..

Self-publishing three books last year was a step forward; I had file folders full of short stories, journal entries and info from the last job I held, so I published them to get rid of them.

Due to short cords and other unknown factors, I have to type—such as I am doing now—with my keyboard in my lap. As I survey the top of my computer desk I see the dregs of a glass of a cocoanut rum mixture, reading glasses from Dollar Tree, two new pairs of socks that are too small for me, a pack of hearing aid batteries, 4 paperback books, three flash drives, a screwdriver, a Diet Coke bottle top, a computer cord that I don’t recognize, an antique toy rolling pin I bought as a gift but never gave, and a green pair of pliers left from loosening a recalcitrant bottletop. Oh, then on the pull-out lap computer shelf there is a banana peel sans banana, a checkbook, a journal and a free copy of a book by Bill Cosby.

I do love to be able to start writing at midnight if I like, or groggily tap out a dream early in the morning. See, it is 1:15 a.m. now. Nan