Absent

Yesterday I got an email from my blog. It went something like this:

Dear Deserter,

I hate you!

With sincere loathing,

Your blog

So I got the impression that maybe I shouldn’t go off and neglect it quite so much or it might eventually leave me…and then where would I put thoughts on my dysfunctional life? Maybe in a notebook…but that would eventually run away as well.

Anyway, to soften the blow of my absence, I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain what I’ve been up to, because it hasn’t all been margaritas, nudie runs and crossword puzzles.
I’ve been packing.

I want you to take that statement with the depressing gravity that I say it with, because I sincerely believe that if there is a hell it probably looks a lot like my apartment at the moment. That is filled with boxes, piles of crap and a loony, shifty-eyed writer sitting dejectedly in the middle of it all.

I’m a hoarder. A massive “don’t throw that away, we might need it later” hoarder. This means that I have shelves, boxes and draws filled with things like Fijian plaques carved with glorious misspellings of my name, ticket stubs to concerts I went to several years ago, Christmas and birthday cards and just about anything that was ever given to me. Because, you never know, one day I might be struck by lightning and have to rebuild my memory from the things I own.

Of course if that ever happens and I discover the Fijian Turtle Island plaque I’ll be going around introducing myself as “Agnosika”, but the alternative would leave me bumbling through life not knowing if and when I went to Fiji…and that would be a tragedy.

Understandably, Mark who is not a hoarder and would probably throw away the shoes he was wearing if they got in his way, has wisely decided to let me pack and just be there for moral support when I decide that I really don’t need a little porcelain cow (even though it was given to me by a blind child during my travels through Europe).

Needless to say, packing up an entire apartment filled with indispensable items that nobody wants has been akin to sawing off my own arm and then tossing it into a shark enclosure. A bit dramatic? Well sorry I’ve just culled fifty per cent of my wardrobe (including the jeans that have a hole in the crutch, but still fit me. STILL FIT ME!) and I’m a little sad.

The problem is that we need to be out of the apartment in under two weeks and I haven’t even scratched the surface. In fact I’m beginning to suspect that my things are reproducing because I keep packing and the apartment is as full of junk as when I started.

I’ve become so desperate that sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just threw all of my stuff off the balcony or whether I could get a woodchipping machine into the apartment. But then I remember just how much I want to finish the painting I started a decade ago and how sad it would be if it was reduced to sawdust, so I sit in the centre of the room and spend an hour deciding whether I can part with it. In the meantime my blog paces nervously around my computer waiting for me to visit and begins to plot against me…

And that’s what I’ve been up to…