By Emily Rosen
ERosen424@aol.com
www.emilyrosen424.com
People who really know me laugh when I say, and believe me, I say it often, “I have to clean my desk.” They’ve been hearing that for years – nay – decades. The thing of it is … I HAVE cleaned my desk. But, unless I do it on an hourly basis, it runs away from me.
In most respects, I am a person with a stable personality, very few hang-ups, fairly even-tempered and extremely good at multitasking. But – about my desk, I am, if you’ll pardon the redundancy, a dysfunctional basket case, with a serious condition, that admittedly seeps into other parts of my life, called “fear of throwing things away,” or in psychobabble talk, “Disposophobia.”
The surface of my built-in desk runs the length of my office room. It is about 20 ft. long by about 30 in. deep and faces a window. Nice, huh? If you close your eyes and picture it naked, that is, empty, clean, devoid of any surface paraphernalia, you can imagine yourself lying on it, head to toe with perhaps two other people, uncomfortably hard as that might be. Sometimes, I do that – imagine it naked, that is, and I yearn to take my arm, crook it at the elbow, and swish it clean.
But of course, I dare not. It is bulging with the usual office requisites, fax machine, in-box, (OMG – currently about 8 in. high) computer, telephone, two small calculators, copier printer- scanner-all-in-one, boom box with assorted CDs (and, I tell you ashamedly, a container holding myriad cassettes – remember them?), five filled-to-the-brim file holders, three pencil-pen holders (I collect [steal?] pens) and books, books, books. Underneath all of this are eight built-in huge drawers of files and 10 smaller drawers of “junk,” over which, attached to the walls on either side of the window, are six huge cabinets with more books and 2-and 3-in. loose leaf binders, one for every year since 1985 containing my writings. If they interviewed me for C-Span, it would take hours to explain. (you know, it’s cathartic to catalogue this. I never did it before – but, now I’m wondering, why would you care? Forget it, I’m on a roll!)
If you’re too young to remember the Collyer brothers of Manhattan, you might want to Google them just for the fun of it. I just did. They were discovered dead in their Harlem apartment, in 1947, asphyxiated, sort of, by the more than 100 TONS of assorted junk they had accumulated over many years. I felt good reading about them because, honestly, I don’t come anywhere near them in that department, although, at the rate I am going …
So, I was going to “clean it up” today. Yes, today was the day. And, instead, look what I am doing. And, soon, it will be time to prepare dinner, write a book review, return about eight telephone calls I’d been accruing – and … maybe tomorrow. Ya think?
