Cache and Carry

Hoarding: the excessive collection of items, along with the inability to discard them.


I am a hoarder.

I don't collect things. Tangible things, anyway. The hallways of my house are not cluttered with stacks of newspapers or magazines. I don't have bags of dryer lint stashed in a closet. No balls of rubber bands, baggies of twist ties, or an endless chain of linked paperclips. The things I collect are taking up space in my head. And I think it might be turning into a problem.

I came to this conclusion the other day while grocery shopping. Walking down one of the aisles, I passed an elderly woman and a voice in my head said, "Wow, that woman looks exactly like the grandmother on The Waltons." The tone of the voice was so matter-of-factly banal, offering no more reaction than recognizing water being wet. Yeah, I watched The Waltons as a kid, but that was in the 70's, which meant my recognition of that character had lodged itself somewhere in my head for almost forty years. But hearing that in my head wasn't the worst part. Another voice in my head chimed in, adding, "Ellen Corby."

I also have a brain cell in my
head that looks exactly like
John-Boy's mole.

The human brain weighs approximately three pounds and it contains roughly 100 billion brain cells. That's 100 b-i-l-l-i-o-n. As I began to think about this, I grew concerned about how much I'm pushing that capacity by housing non-essential trivia, like Ellen Corby, inside my brain. Perhaps her arthritic grip on a brain cell had prevented some other significant item from being at the forefront of my life. Maybe my failure to be my high school's valedictorian can be traced back and attributed to Ellen Corby blocking a correct answer on a test in middle school, giving me a lower grade which damaged my confidence and thereby destroyed my academic ambitions. Ellen Corby could be why I have to measure twice before I cut once. Certainly Ellen Corby must be part of the reason I have to write down all of my Internet passwords.

To be fair, it can't be all Ellen's fault as her name can certainly be interchanged with any number of random things cluttering up my head. Things like "chad." When I was a kid, Chad was a person's name. I'm using a brain cell to hold onto that. Then I learned it was a country in the middle of Africa, so I had to store that in my head, too. Then I learned it was also that piece of paper punched out of a ballot...and that they can hang! That's two more brain cells for the same thing! And for what? I don't know anyone named Chad, I have no plans to travel to Chad, and bits of paper punched from paper already have a name. They're called confetti. They don't need another name!

I also know what an aglet is. An aglet. With the exception of right now, I'm not ever going to use aglet. Oh, sure, I might look at the tip of my shoelace and somewhere in my deep recesses of my mind there's an association between what I'm seeing and what it is. But I can't recall ever hearing that word echo off the inside of my skull and pop out of my mouth. The only people who use aglet in conversation are people who want to make themselves seem smarter by saying shit like "aglet."

     "What's wrong with your shoe, Chris?"

     "Oh, the end of my shoelace frayed, Ted, and now I can't thread it through the 

       hole."

     "You mean the aglet broke?"

I don't know about you, but I'd want to whack Ted on the back of the head with a rolled up copy of his Brookstone catalog for saying that. Ted would be the kind of guy who actually owns an aglet tool to fix his broken aglets. He's as useless as wet tape if you need a pair of pliers, but he's got an aglet tool you can borrow. No man with normal levels of testosterone would walk up to another man and ask him if he happened to have an aglet tool, let alone ask to borrow it. That's because men don't replace aglets. They light a match and fuse the end of the lace so they can lace it through the lace hole. Then they tie their shoelace so they don't trip over it on the way to the shoe store to buy a new shoelace. So except for those pretentious asses like Ted, aglet just sits in the head taking up space. Forever.

I have a theory that the accumulation of useless crap over time is why people have difficulty remembering things as they get older. There's just too much blocking them from reaching the stuff they want, plus it takes too much effort to get there. It'd be nice if grandpa could dig deep enough to remember where he left his 1,000 shares of original Apple Computer stock. Unfortunately, all you can get out of him now are the same four or five stories he's told every time you've visited him for the last fifteen years.

I wish there was a way to manage what goes into my head and stays there. Unfortunately, there's stuff that goes in that I don't want and I can't do a damn thing about it. The closest thing I can think of is something like a lobotomy. But I don't want to empty the theater, I just want to ask the few assholes disrupting the show to leave. So I guess I'm stuck with chads and aglets and Ellen Corby and all of the rest of that stuff that are red wine stains on a white carpet. They may fade over time, but they'll never fully disappear.

I just hope I don't end up blaming Ellen Corby for my inability to remember how they got there.