Proliferation

Do you know what I just did? I just bought another handbag. This might seem like a thing that is not even worthy of mention; and in and of itself, it is not. But if you’re not doing anything and you have all the time in the world, feel free to search this blog for the words “handbag,” “tote bag,” “purse,” “pocketbook,” or “reticule.” 

Not the last one, of course, because it’s not 1893. It’s 2020, and I have far too many handbags, as your careful search of these keywords will have made manifestly and abundantly clear. Not only did I buy another handbag, but I bought a whole bunch of other random stuff that I don’t need. And even though I know that I don’t need these things (in fact, I won’t even WANT some of them when they finally arrive), I just keep yielding to the impulse to add something to my electronic cart and then to finally push the “place order” button. There’s always a momentary thrill just as you push that button, isn’t there? And then of course, there’s the fun of anticipation, the frisson of excitement as the mail truck or the UPS truck rumble down your street, slowing until they stop right in front of your house. Nothing else sounds like a delivery truck arriving at your front door. 

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Do you have any particular rage triggers? I’m not an angry outburst kind of person, liberal use of the f-word notwithstanding. But I do have a few things that provoke unreasonable, blinding, furious rage. A wrong turn, especially at night, is one of those things. Last night, I turned the wrong way on a now-unfamiliar road (I say “now-unfamiliar” because it’s a road that I used to drive on nearly every day; but I no longer live in that neighborhood and the street and the neighborhood look very different now because of twenty years of construction and development) and the result was a 15-minute detour in the dark and a near collision (entirely my fault) with a person who was trying to make a perfectly legal left turn as I tried to blithely sail straight through an intersection from the other left-turn-only lane. I was furious. Not my finest moment. 

And drawers! How I hate it when a drawer gets stuck closed or (much worse, because it looks sloppy) stuck open. I have to walk away from a jammed drawer. Thank goodness I’ve never had a hammer nearby when a drawer was stuck because I’d turn the whole cabinet or desk or chest into kindling. 

The worst thing about a drawer that’s stuck is that I almost always know that it’s going to happen when I put in that one extra thing that’s just too much for the drawer, but I do it anyway because I can’t stand to have things laying around uncontained and because I can’t let the drawer win. Me and a dresser drawer are like Donald Trump and the coronavirus. I’m not going to let it dominate me. I’m just going to call in a Navy helicopter and a team of Secret Service agents and Army doctors and then stand back and let them show that drawer who’s boss. 

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So I followed my own instructions, and I did a search of this blog using the recommended terms. It turns out that I have written about having too many handbags more times than other people actually have handbags. Does that make sense? I’m talking about sheer numbers, a subject about which I am not qualified to write, but just try to stop me. 

I like to think of myself as a person who is not a collector, but that’s self-delusion of the highest order, because I have more than enough handbags to form a collection; not to mention hundreds of books, dozens of t-shirts, a shitpile of notebooks, and Bic four-color pens distributed everywhere I might need them to take a four-color note. It’s not reasonable. And it occurs to me, with my razor-sharp intellect and unparalleled deductive reasoning skills, that there might be a connection between a proliferation of stuff such as I describe here, and drawers that won’t close (or open). 

The moratorium begins now. No more handbags. No more non-electronic books. No more four-color pens, except to replace one when the ink runs dry. No promises on the t-shirts. I do love t-shirts; and in my defense, I accumulate them, but I seldom actually buy them. 

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And now it also occurs to me, with my steel-trap mind, that t-shirts are the only thing on this list that I actually store in drawers, so a handbag and book and pen moratorium won’t solve my drawer-rage problem AT ALL. As for bad night driving? That’s only going to get worse, I’m afraid. It’s all downhill from here.