WHEN SADDAM HUSSEIN was pulled from his spider hole looking like a bedraggled Walt Whitman after a month-long poetry slam, I experienced joy not just as an American, but as someone whose spirit has been knitted to those of my liberated Iraqi brothers. For a day, anyway, I felt like an Iraqi, and celebrated like an Iraqi. I ululated. I hit despised objects with house slippers. I planted roadside explosives for a week from now, when my unbridled ebullience will turn to amnesiac ingratitude.
Still, while I’m not defending Saddam Hussein–that’s what God made Dominique de Villepin for–I have a bone to pick with the coverage of his capture. Here was a tyrant who’d been responsible for latching jumper cables to testicles, who’d amputated people’s ears, and who’d murdered countless innocents. But the only fault nitpicking eyewitnesses harped on was along the lines of this AP headline: “Saddam’s Hideaway Found Cluttered, Messy.”
Reporters and soldiers alike called it a “miserable hole,” noted food “half-eaten out on the shelves,” and said “it smelled really bad.” In pornographic detail, they portrayed the place as strewn with clothes and Mars bars, dirty plates amassing in the sink, as if, with the world’s fiercest fighting force pursuing him, Saddam should have had time to load the dishwasher.
If there’s a note of sympathy in my plaint, it’s because clutter-wise, I’m something of a Saddam Hussein myself. While my immaculate wife runs a tight housekeeping ship, any space I’m in charge of gets buried under stacks of paper, press badges, road souvenirs, and other dry goods that make both my home and work offices look like archaeological-dig-meets-compost-heap. My car is a four-cylinder filing cabinet so packed with junk that I haven’t successfully transported a passenger in years. The last one who braved a ride had to sit on six inches of yellowed newspapers and wedge her feet up on the dashboard, since leg-space was long ago lost to my old phone-book collection.
My work office is in such disarray that once, when I hosted an OSHA inspector for a story I was reporting, he accused me of “trashing it on purpose,” even though I’d tidied up before his arrival. Coworkers have noticed. My boss’s assistant even took to leaving subtle hints, like shutting my door and turning out the lights. When that didn’t work, she came through with a trash can, pitching old files and priceless pieces of correspondence, like my Publisher’s Clearing House winner’s notice, which would’ve afforded me the financial freedom to quit my job, instead of spending my days scribbling columns like this one.
My home office is much scarier. The last time the floor was visible, Jesse Ventura was considered sane, and Tina Brown was “v. hot.” My wife, who was once ashamed of it, now reveres it as a tourist attraction, bringing houseguests up to snap pictures. One was so overcome with awe that he actually dove into the pile the way children do into those plastic ball-pits at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Recently, we nearly lost our electrician, who slipped while installing a phone line, and was temporarily trapped behind a box. Beneath years’ worth of books, magazines, Nexis piles, etc., sit my lost car keys, credit cards, and God knows what else. Even my dog nearly became a casualty when the door shut behind him, and his barks for help couldn’t be heard through the walls, muffled by junk.
My friends politely suggest that mine is not a lifestyle choice, but an early sign of mental illness. They’ve tried to help me turn things around, by putting me onto de-cluttering gurus like the online “Flylady”–the “FLY” stands for “finally loving yourself.” Her acolytes concentrate on their houses’ “hot spots” and cleaning “zones.” They strive to finish their chores early so they can write in online forums that they’re about to “goof off all morning at the Christmas brunch program….Chocolate WILL be involved!”
The Flylady is all about routines. She recommends shining your sink before bed each night, then giving yourself “cool down” time. “I like bubble baths!” she writes. I don’t. I relate more keenly to the story of the infamous Collyer brothers–a pair of gold-plated eccentrics who, in the 1940s, were found dead in their house, which was packed with 180 tons of clutter–everything from a horse’s jawbone to an X-ray machine. Disabled Homer had starved to death after brother Langley was crushed by a pile of junk while tunneling through to deliver food. They died for their craft–kind of inspiring to us packrats. It’s how I see myself going.
So come into my spider hole, Flylady. Unlike Saddam, nobody’s taking me out alive.
–Matt Labash
