Clearing House

Sundays usually brings out the busybody in me. What often happens is that I try to reorganize The Sanctum into a more spacious, manageable formation.

Well, today I actually opened up the lower cabinets- an underworld abyss where I cast all my old VHS tapes, Playstation games, VCDs and PC CDs. My own mini-ubliette, I guess. It was a daunting and intimidating sight... PILES and piles of hard, solid masses that seemed immoveable from their stronghold. Many times I opened up the cabinet before and gave up after a long struggle, not knowing where to deposit the stuff. Packing it in plastics and just dumping it somewhere was awkward. Even just grouping the stuff was a feat in frustration. It was like corruption in government. A plastic skeleton in my closet.

But somehow I had the strength this day. I got three boxes and filled them up with all the stuff I wanted to liquidate- TONS and TONS of anime VHS tapes, piles of movie and game CDs, and HUGE masses of plastic bags.

Looking at it all, I was totally horrified at the amount of junk. But then, this was the result of years- years of buying VHS anime in Greenhills, years of getting bootleg movie VCDs from sidewalk vendors (this was the time before DVDs became in vogue) and years of accumulating and accumulating, stockpiling, amassing and collecting.

It felt good to finally organize it all and deposit them into boxes and get them out of my room. Sorta like an enema. A stomach pump. An exorcism. Painful but it does you good.