The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

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July 3, 2009

Mike Pound: Problems are starting to pile up

I walked into our bedroom the other night and couldn’t find our bed.

I knew that could only mean one thing: I had walked into the wrong house. Again.

No, I joke. What it meant when I couldn’t find our bed in our bedroom was that my wife had been “cleaning” again.

My wife has a somewhat unique way of cleaning. Basically, my wife cleans by moving things from one room to the next. Let me, if I can, detail a typical example of my wife’s cleaning method.

My wife decides she needs to clean out her car. The first thing my wife does is locate her car in our garage.

Sometimes our garage gets messy.

Once my wife locates her car, she takes all of the junk in her car that does not belong in her car and hauls it into our kitchen. But in order to put the junk in her car in our kitchen, my wife needs to move the junk that was already in our kitchen into our dining room. Once she does that, she needs to take all the junk that was already in our dining room upstairs to our guest bedroom. Of course, in order to put the junk from our dining room into our guest bedroom, she has to take the junk in the guest bedroom and put it in our bedroom. And when that happens I can’t find our bed.

I don’t want you to get the impression that our house tends to be cluttered. It does, I just don’t want you to get that impression. What we tend to have in our house is what I like to call “I’m gonna” piles.

As in, “I’m gonna put this stuff away later.”

Unfortunately around our house, “I’m gonna” actually means “I’m gonna ignore it until it’s no longer my problem.”

See, there are rules when it comes to a pile of junk. If someone sets down a pile of junk and says, “I’m gonna puts this stuff away later,” it is clearly that person’s responsibility to do so. Unless the pile of junk manages to stay in the same place for more than a week. When a pile of junk stays in one place for more than a week, it becomes community property and therefore the burden of putting the pile of junk away falls on whoever objects to the pile of junk’s presence. As a consequence, no one objects to the pile of junk.

My wife once ignored a pile of junk sitting in front of our TV in the basement for three full months. Then she discovered the pile of junk was me. So she ignored it for three more months.

This pile-of-junk protocol that we practice at our house raises an interesting philosophical question: “If no one notices a pile of junk, is it a pile of junk?”

Clearly the answer is no. Unless we are expecting company. Then the pile of junk becomes something that must be dealt with quickly and efficiently, and the quickest and most efficient way to deal with a pile of junk is to move it. Preferably to a place that the expected company will never visit.

Like the landfill. Or our bedroom.

Sometimes a pile of junk will stay in one place so long that we will give it a name.

Wife: Did we get any mail?

Me: Yes.

Wife: Where is it?

Me: I sat it next to Bob.

Wife: Oh, I see it.

And whenever someone finally does move a pile of junk, it feels like we’ve lost a member of the family.

“I’ll never forget the way the dust used to settle on Bob,” I will say.

“He will always be in our hearts,” my wife will say.

“Get over it. It was a pile of junk,” our 11-year-old daughter, Emma, will say.

It’s sad when Emma is the voice of reason in our house.

Eventually my wife and I are going to take the bull by the tail and face the situation. Eventually my wife and I are going to have to deal with the piles of the junk in our house. And by deal with the piles of junk, I don’t mean take the piles of junk and put them in our bedroom. That practice clearly must stop.

The reason that practice must stop is because our house is beginning to lean under the weight of the piles of junk. The way I think we should deal with the piles of junk is to shovel them out the window into a waiting dump truck and pay someone to drive the truck to NASA headquarters and shoot them into space.

My wife’s plan for dealing with the piles of junk is to buy large plastic containers and put the piles of junk into the plastic containers. My wife’s plan then calls for her to carry the plastic containers full of piles of junk out to her car.

Where they will stay until she has to clean her car again.

Address correspondence to Mike Pound, c/o The Joplin Globe, P.O. Box 7, Joplin, MO 64802, or via e-mail at mpound@joplinglobe.com.

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