Sesame Street

You wouldn’t believe all the junk we writers keep around. It’s not that we particularly have more things than most people, it’s just that writers always seem to have more pressing things to do than keep their humble abodes clean, such as getting an overdue manuscript in, scratching out 4,000 words on some draft, rewriting a scene where everyone has green hair, etc. The unimportant things in life such as eating, sleeping, and keeping our living conditions up to par with health and safety inspections just fall to the floor.

I decided it was high time, whilst awaiting the revisions from my editor, to give my room a good solid cleaning. After all, I’ve lived here for six months and as you can see, there’s still loads of things in boxes. The reason for this is that the moment I got here I immediately hopped on Youtube and haven’t pulled myself from it since. Oh, and there was that book deal thing. And the college thing. But after I went to my Big Junk Drawer and couldn’t find my box of favorite pens, I realized that I was living as messy as Ernie, and something had to be done about it.

Anyhow, I got set on cleaning stuff out. Writers have a thing with pens, paper and notebooks. I have boxes and filing cabinets filled with them. I can understand that, but what I don’t understand is why I need 43 sales receipts from various stores stuffed in my dresser drawers. It’s not like I don’t have stacks of free note pads lying around from college salesmen (college salesmen are those folks that come around campus trying to get you to pay more fees for learning overseas, special classes, new computers, etc, and love handing free stuff out). My junk drawer in particular had grown out of hand:

Yes, that is a cassette tape. No, I didn’t throw it away.

Whilst cleaning, I realized that when I come in, I always drop all my change into the drawer and forget about it. Imagine my surprise when I pulled all the junk out to find this at the bottom:

I felt like Ali Baba stumbling upon the treasury of the forty thieves. Then, I found something else stuck between the lid of a box:

I can’t imagine how it could have gotten lost in the drawer. Maybe I should start cleaning things out a little more often…