Every five years or so, I like to clean up my office. Even by disheveled journalists’ standards, it’s really quite a dump. Once, when I had an OSHA inspector over for an interview, he thought I was setting him up. “You trashed it on purpose,” he said, before literally declaring it a disaster area. So every quinquennial, I like to roll up the sleeves on my biohazard suit, and address the mounds of paper and half-filled cups, the oil spills, used syringes, and other detritus that accumulates from a life carelessly led.
Usually, after sifting through the rubble, I don’t turn up much of great value. Sure, I’m glad I held on to the Purel hand-sanitizer given to me by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, issued on the off-chance The Donald dared shake reporters’ hands. And there’s my favorite piece of hate mail, from “Iron John” author Robert Bly, who wrote to complain that he’d been victimized by my “stupid slander” of his work (get in line, pal). But for the most part, the mess on my floor tends to be long-forgotten Nexis stacks, yellowed newspapers, and inky, urgent pamphlets, collected from the mentally unstable types that one often encounters as a reporter for a political magazine.
