Involuntary Muscles

Open call to friends: please come stay with me! Not in the next couple of weeks, though, because my place is currently clogged with enormous amounts of embarrassing junkI don't want you to see. You may think, oh c'mon, I'm no neat freak, how bad can it be? You really don't want to know. Suffice it to say, my cat is running out of floor space to navigate and some of these things are off-gassing as their organic compounds transform, OK? Let's rephrase that: please come stay with me after giving me two weeks' notice!

There is only one other apartment I have ever seen that even comes close to so loudly declaring stuckness and despair. I once knew an eccentric guy whose small apartment was so full of years and years' worth of hoarded documents that his living space consisted merely of pulpy corridors leading to the fridge and the bed. Very soon after moving out of there, he came out of the closet. Perhaps he had wanted to come out and be gay a long time before but simply lost his way to the door.

Friends have been hearing about the horrors of my apartment for quite a while, but believe me, it has only in the last few months reached its nadir. Its dilapidated state is so advanced that a corner of me is almost in awe of its monumental awfulness. It is the place of someone who for quite some time has not wanted to admit to living here. I have been so sad and so divided inside myself for so long that I didn't want to get into the boring rhythyms of normal housekeeping and their confluence with life's larger cycles. I've been ambivalent about being alive. I was afraid. I didn't want to be rooted anywhere. I didn't want to be a properly self-interested animal, making a nice place to curl up and sleep at night. I didn't want to be on a regular schedule. Then I would have to live up to regularly dealing with hundreds of external unpleasantnesses that would no sooner be dealt with than be replaced with other, possibly more protracted, ones.

In my agonized frame of mind, this seemed too much to bear. I wanted to be somewhere else, always somewhere else. Oh no, not for me to keep the dust and material chaos at bay. It's a losing battle that never ends, so why pick a fight?

I really knew I was in trouble when I realized this negative anticipation was causing me to procrastinate sleep! I knew I would blink then wake up still having to take care of all those hateful dirty dishes.

Now I'm starting to get that if you're not pretty much constantly struggling against entropy, you're not really alive. Without time's cycles of drudge and occasional delight, how can we tell it? How can we tell the stories upon which our lives depend? If you're not here to sweep up, push up, step up, and organize your spice rack, then what the hell are you doing on this planet? We are everywhere living corporeality whether we like it or not. It is what we are: divine thoughts made flesh: chemical concerts fighting infection: the absurdity of lust: Einstein taking a fulsome crap.

Interestingly, throughout the many dark days and months of the last few years, I never had any trouble keeping on top of my personal hygiene and peripatetic coverings. I think most acquaintances and even friends would be shocked by the contrast between the carefully chosen colours and textures of my dress, and the piles on top of piles on top of the I-don't-even-remember-what-the-fuck's-in-there all over my apartment. I think it's very telling that I kept up my outward appearance while living like a beggar in my own home. I kept the terribleness I felt INSIDE. I quite literally tried to barricade inside my private lair parts of me I couldn't bring myself to love.

Now they want to stretch out. They want to play. They don't want to be lonely anymore.

A very dear one is coming to visit from out of town this weekend. I believe her when she says she'd love me no matter what. It's time I began to learn how to extend that fecund generosity to myself. Love is work sometimes.

For each cleaning session I'll write a little something here about some newly unearthed, forgotten item that most stirs me into remembering who and where I've been. It will be an archaeology of the heart. Or ridiculous. One by one I'll look at all my things and say goodbye to most of them. Let the work-in-progress show itself.

Maybe I'll find enough quarters to buy some fresh paint.