I tried to clear up some of the mess in the house tonight, by shoving boxes of winter clothes into the cupboard under the eaves at the front of our house, and then by moving various things out of the toy room and into the new space we have under the porch. This cleared out some gardening tools, my scooter (unridden since we moved to the US in 2019), a box of bicycle wheels, and a plastic disc the kids use to slide around in the snow. We’re keeping our axe indoors, I’m not sure why.
Despite this excavation, the toy room doesn’t seem any more spacious than before, but I hope with a few more attempts, it will become tidy (or I can find space to move some of the clutter from the living room into the toy room and hide it away).
Then I lay on the sofa and read Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself To Live, a memoir about driving around the US writing an article about dead rock stars, and also complaining about the women he’s loved and lost. It wasn’t the cheeriest of reads, and I kept wanting to shake him by the collar and tell him to sort himself out. But he’s good at making generalisations that you don’t initially see any flaws in.
There was one section that really struck me, and now I’m leafing through the book trying to find it, and perhaps like the one perfect sentence in a Bret Easton Ellis book I’ll never retrieve it.
Ah yes, on reminiscing: (p131)
When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago-and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail-it’s disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you. It’s astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore and (b) never even cross your mind. It’s almost like those things didn’t happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else.
I wonder if Chuck Klosterman is happier now than when he wrote that.