23. Defenestration

After lunch I headed back up to the attic, and with clear eyes I reviewed my earlier progress: I had spent two hours going through seven boxes and had decided to keep almost every piece of paper I had touched. Whereas earlier this has entertained me, now it just horrified me; I was a hoarder! At this rate soon I would be keeping pizza boxes and toilet paper rolls, and then move on not being able to part with bags of trash and dead cat carcasses! I could not let this happen! And the first step was to get rid of all of the this random twenty year old paperwork. I had to find the courage to just get rid of it once and for all.

I sat back down among the piles and began to move things around. As I resorted everything again, I moved a few more pieces into the ‘To Toss’ pile, but the ‘To Save’ pile till stayed enormous. After an hour more of resorting, I noticed my nostalgia had kicked back in and I had begun to move things back from ‘To Toss’ again to ‘To Save.’ This would not do.

Running downstairs I poured a Diet Coke and paced. It was only three o’clock. I had wasted the better part of the day and had accomplished nothing. I had to get rid of a significant amount of something or it would prove Thad right; it would prove I was a deranged hoarder, a crazy person. I had to make a stand against this. I had to just get rid of it all, and apparently if I took the time to sort, I would never get rid of anything. I had to just do it. I had to make a quick break of it. I knew what I had to do.

Girding myself, I stomped back upstairs and threw open the attic window that overlooked the backyard. The cold air felt good against the musty attic stank.  I lunged at the ‘To Save’ pile and grabbed a handful of paperwork and sprinted over to the open window to chuck it out. The release of watching the papers float down to the snowy yard was so crazy liberating. I ran back and grabbed more. This was my moment. I would live in the present and stop hoarding the past! I was not insane! I threw more out: the papers flew from my hands to lilt through the air and alight on the snowy white ground below.   

I did this until only one notebook remained, one notebook of my most treasured memories-the important school papers, the doodled ‘Thaddeus,’ the first draft of my dissertation. Everything else was gone, as I had originally planned. And I felt good and sane and complete for the first time since beginning this demon project.  

Leaving the attic, I felt like a man who had never been in therapy once.

Pulling on my snow boots, I headed outside to the backyard. The ten degree weather cut bitterly, but all I had to do was gather the scattered papers and put them in the trash, then I would be done with them. Carefully, I walked through the icy snow to the get the big trashcan and drug it to the middle of the papers, which lay scattered in a giant circle from the point of impact. I began to gather them, chucking handful after handful into the big bin. I was so proud of myself, so thrilled to be moving from ‘Past Michael’ to ‘Present Michael.’ Moving from someone mired in collecting the past to someone living in the present. This was a huge step and I couldn’t wait to rub it in Thad’s prissy little face…

And that’s when I noticed something: my Social Security number written at the top of one of the papers, directly under my name. How odd. I shouldn’t let my Social Security number out, not in this day and age of internet identity theft. The page had to be shredded for my security. And then it occurred to me, it was college policy when I was in school in the late 1980’s that you wrote your name and university ID at the top of each page. And at the time, in that innocent period before Al Gore had invented the internet, and way before hackers and the treat of identity theft were even on your parent’s lips, that your university ID was your Social Security number. My pulse quickened and my eyes slid to the next piece of paper I had in hand. 

It was a history paper from 1989 about the California gold rush, and there on the top was my name and Social Security number written in my own innocent scrawled hand. I flipped to the next item: a Classics paper about Antigone, also with my name and Social Security number written at the top. And then the next item: a blue book from a history class with my name and Social Security number written on the top of each page of the ten page blue book detailing the origins of the Civil War.  

And then like a scene out of the X-Files or that movie where Russell Crowe is a crazy mathematician, I looked around me on the ground and every piece of paper I saw lit up with my name and Social Security number, my name and Social Security number, my name and Social Security number. Everyone of them. And if just one of these got out, if just one bad guy got a hold of even just one of these pieces of paper, my identity could be stolen and I could be ruined. They could get credit cards in my name, get into my banking information, and ruin me. Just flat ruin me.

With eyes bugged out, pale as the snow around, I let out a shriek so loud birds from a tree next door took to the air.  

And suddenly, with all of my joy gone, I found myself crazed, scooping up all of papers as if my very life depended on it, as it did! Frantically I gathered all I could from the ground into a huge armful just as the wind picked up to scatter the remains. And then in shin-high snow I crazily fumbled through the yard trying to catch page after page as they blew this way and that. As if even one got out, I could be ruined-ruined! And it would be no one’s fault but my own, that’s what Smith would say, and he would be right! It was my own fault for throwing them all out, and it would be my own fault if I was ruined!   

I trudged inside and threw what I held to the kitchen floor, and stomped back out to gather handful after handful and bring them back inside, they now wet and dripping, to thrown them all to the floor. I knew what I did was crazy, but I had to, as I couldn’t let them get away. I had to. Back outside, I dumped the trashcan over to recover the ones I had tossed in there. I had to have them all. They all had to be destroyed. 

After thirty minutes, and two slight falls on the ice, I had drug all of the paperwork into the kitchen, where it now all lay scattered. As I scanned it-name and Social Security number, name and Social Security number, name and Social Security number- I felt flat crazy, but knew I was not out of it yet. How had I been so stupid to not notice this earlier? I had to destroy all of these, but there was too much to shred in my little home shredder plus everything had staples, which would take hours for me to remove before I could even begin shredding, so what do I do?
I paced and spread everything out to dry. And I paced and moved things around, getting it back to a semblance of order; just to appease the chaos around me. And after much thought and some insane terror that I knew was false but I could not back down from, I decided it all just needed to go back up to the attic for safekeeping.  

Yup. That’s what needed to happen.

Out of sight, out of mind.

And then I could just deal with it later.

So like an automaton, a crazy, crazy automaton, I went back up to the attic,  got all of the seven original 'School' boxes and brought them back to the kitchen. Quietly I reboxed everything, and like an insane man, carried it all right back up to the attic from which it had been flung.

And I did this crazed with a compulsion I would not control, only obey.

And after another hour, after I had finally finished and was sweeping the kitchen floor, I realized that I had brought this misery upon myself: I had toyed with order, I had mocked my innate sensibilities and thus been smacked back into place. And I knew this was a fit, an OCD episode, but it was over now. I would keep the boxes of school notes for no other purpose than it might actually kill me to get rid of it all. But, now finally calming, I was deeply, deeply embarrassed as I was afraid I might actually be crazy.

As I put away the broom and went to lock the attic door I realized I was a hoarder, and maybe that wasn’t as bad of a thing to be after all.         

When Thad called later he did not ask about my project and I did not tell him about my episode: Some things between couples are better left unsaid.