Just finished a thoughtful and often hilarious book about hoarding (Mess). The author describes his journey to clean up his apartment along with other hoarding-related topics. Famous hoarders and psychological issues and various hoarder support strategies and organizations among other things. I noted that many of the people he interviewed in the process admitted to have a bit of a hoarding thing going on themselves. That includes people with successful careers studying hoarders or helping people de-hoard. Go figger. We all have stuff.

This book had me laughing out loud any number of times. I think my favorite story was when the author was initially struggling to get started on his “project”. Unbeknownst to him, his girlfriend and her mother (who lived in nearby apartments) tried to foist a steamroller-type cleaning woman upon him. She was a known quantity and he didn’t want anything to do with her. One day his doorbell rang and by the time he got to it, no one was there. As it turned out, it was the steamroller. She had heard him inside and stalked off to tell his girlfriend and her mother that she knew he was in there WITH HIS MISTRESS. His girlfriend was cracking up when she reported this. This cracked meeeee up because it kinda reminds me of the kind of relationship I have with the GG. His mistress? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I mean, I send the GG off to hike with wimmen ALL THE TIME. A lot of wimmen don’t like to hike without a [safe] man (rightly so) and his absence space-ifies me. I didn’t sign up for the pandemic and its ensuing 24/7 togetherness.

There are a lot of theories about what causes people to hoard and I’m not sure it can be boiled down to any one thing or even a set of things. I will say that there were/are hoarders sprinkled here and there on both sides of my family as well as both sides of the GG’s. There are neatniks too and everything in between. I cannot figure a common personality or history theme or whatever. As the book touched on many times, our hoarders were/are generally people that we LOVE. We just don’t enjoy visiting them in their living quarters. I loved the author’s descriptions of the interesting odors he encountered when visiting the homes of extreme hoarders, like one guy who had to kind of climb up a pile of crapola and “shimmy” into his house near the ceiling to get in and out. Been there, done that. I mean the odors, not the shimmying 🐽 (By the time the author visited, a very kind neighbor had gently helped the hoarder decrease the hoard so you didn’t have to climb and shimmy.)

I am not a hoarder. You can run a vacuum cleaner through my house without a problem. No “Goat Paths.” But we do have a lot of stuff that I would be happy to get rid of and I am at about the END of the things *I* want to get rid of for now.

Oh dear, I will have to cut this short. The GG just got off the phone with MDUH (who is moving) and has offered to take a table saw and a power washer and I fergit what else off MDUH’s hands. THAT, my friends, started to turn into an argument about WHO HAS THE MOST STUFF AROUND HERE🐽 I DO NOT but I guess I am done for tonight.

Mess is a good book if you are into that kind of read. Some Goodreads folks seemed to think the author sounded “pretentious” or whatever, maybe because he travels a lot and his girlfriend seems to pay for it? I dunno. That sounds like sour grapes to me. I found him hilarious among other things. To each her own.

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