Job 2:10
I am posting this from my old iMac that I bought in 2002. It’s mighty slow and it crashes a lot, but for now, it’s all I’ve got. While Fran and I were at work today, someone broke into our house. They tried to enter through the bathroom window, but only managed to bust up the screen; then they successfully got through the bedroom window, breaking both the screen and the window pane in the process. They ransacked the bedroom, and alas, found about $150 in cash we had squirreled away; then they made their way through the house, helping themselves to our two newest computers, my iPod and Bose sounddock, our video camera, and both our digital cameras. They must have left through the sliding glass door out of our den; there were bloodstains there (apparently from the broken glass in the bedroom) but no sign of forcing, suggesting that they opened it from the inside.
What particularly hurts is that I kept my writing files backed up on a memory stick – and it was plugged into my laptop. It’s missing, along with both computers. So basically all the work I’ve done on the book over the last six months (along with all the other writing I had saved, as well as all our digital photos, Rhiannon’s medical records, Fran’s music and recipes) are gone.
Our blessings: we are all okay, as are all three cats. Both guitars were left. We have a friend working on repairing the window, and we do have homeowner’s insurance. Re-creating the book is mostly just a matter of re-doing the work I’ve done, and there’s plenty of material on this blog that will be adapted for the book, and it’s not due on my editor’s desk until St. Brigid’s Day 2009. We’re learning a hard lesson about doing online backups (if you’re not doing that, it’s time to start). But we’re trying to be thankful for our blessings. Although right now we’re all pretty slammed.
Clutter Bulimia
We’re getting ready to have a large spring sale at the bookstore where I work. Selected titles will be discounted 30% — and “selected” means close to a fourth of our current inventory, so there are some real treasures to be found there. We’re trying to reduce our inventory level in anticipation of remodeling the book department, hopefully before the Christmas rush kick in six months from now.
Cleaning is not my long suit. I’m a packrat and a magpie, I love to fill my life with interesting books, magazines, CDs, and trinkets of various sorts. The end result is a chaos of clutter. Normally I just tolerate it, but I get antsy about the clutter when I get busy — and these days I’m very busy, between practicing the bass, writing a book, this blog and the forthcoming CCEL book group, and of course my job and family life. Yee haw! Ironically, it’s when I’m busy that I feel the urge to clear the clutter: when life is more relaxed (and I have more time to work on cleaning), I’m more tolerant of the mess.
There’s a link between creativity and disorder that I never fully understood until one day in the mid 1990s when my printer was on the fritz and I had a job that needed to get done in a hurry, and so I went over to a friend’s house to use hers. She is a prominent full-time artist here in Atlanta — she’s a college art professor and has had numerous showings and public installations — and she lives in a converted warehouse in the city that now functions as both her living space and her studio. When I went to see her and use her computer, I literally had to push piles of papers, books, etc. away from her desk just to see her Mac, let alone use it! Indeed, her entire office was a sea of clutter. Here was one of Atlanta’s most successful artists, and her work space was if anything in greater disarray than mine. It was a moment of profound liberation. At the risk of sounding Nietzchean, I came to the realization that artists have an entirely different relationship to the question of cleanliness and neatness than do ‘ordinary’ mortals. I started paying attention, and have noticed again and again how people who are high-functioning in the world of creativity often seem to be hopeless in the Martha Stewart department. It’s rather amusing.
But I’ve also come to see that I’ve got clutter bulimia: once in a while I have to stop everything and go on a binge of throwing things out, listing books for sale on Half.com, and generally trying to impose some small modicum of order on my pulsating clutter. It’s always a satisfying purge when it happens, and invariably I settle back into a more relaxed period of letting the piles grow, mold-like, pretty much everywhere in the house.
I can feel one of those turns coming on. Hey, it is time for spring cleaning.
