35 - Buddha Can You Spare A Dime

It is an exercise in patience to challenge the greatest of Zen masters: go through and organize the stuff in the garage. Sounds like a typical guy thing, but no. The typical guy thing is to put stuff in the garage where there's room, shove it around impatiently when in need of workbench space, pile shit back on the workbench when in need of a place to keep the lawnmower out of the rain, toss things randomly out of the way that were put "in the way" by some other member of the household, and generally turn the space built for two cars into a disorganized closet with a really big door. Seriously. Drive down the street of any suburb on a warm spring day. All those closets will be open to the air, stuffed with boxes and large odd-shaped objects, occasionally with the fender of a ten to thirty year old car peeking out from underneath.

Accumulating the unfortunately-non-ephemeral impedimenta of life into one’s garage in such a way as to keep room for an actual automobile is a feat of transcendent discipline and vision. Especially after filling the space with all the furniture, dresser drawers, tools, and boxes of books that an aging parent forever left behind in his now-empty and soon-gods-willing-to-be-sold house. It is truly a remarkable thing. That is why it could only happen when I was busy doing something else and my wife had a day off.

Today, I improved on her efforts by completely re-filling the car space with junk. Old junk that needs organizing and re-putting away. Well? There was a large area filled to overflowing with an enormous variety of mostly-metal objects: screws, nuts, nails, brackets, knobs, wire spools, obscure tools, rods, pulleys, hooks, washers, grommets, and countless little things whose name and description will forever be unknown. Now they’re out on tables to be categorized and organized. Just the thing for an OCD sort like me to do.

I helped a friend with his father’s basement earlier this year and learned a little why he’s so successful: he didn’t spend any time organizing shit. If a Thing didn’t have an immediate and obvious use, out it went. Once it’s needed, another can always be bought. Somehow I don’t roll like that. Maybe it’s the influence of my Depression-surviving grandparents from whose stores I glommed boxes of small and useless Things when I was a teenager that I still have. Neat stuff, to a child. To a 51-year-old man? Well. I’m, you know, economical. And when I suddenly need a 10-32 nut, I really hate having to go down to the hardware store. Especially if I come back and find the fucker had to be an M5, so yeah, I keep those too.

Don’t know where this will lead. Maybe I should sweep all that into the garbage can anyway and call it a day. But still, I’m always on the lookout, and sometimes a treasure rolls out of the dragon mound. I pawed through my pocket change yesterday for no particular reason and lo! found a 1942 Mercury-head dime. I wonder where the hell it’s been that I suddenly got it somewhere in change. But I don’t wonder much. What is the value in analyzing a moment of wonder? I can enjoy it for what it is; and since it’s raining like hell today, I can enjoy sorting through mounds of greasy fasteners too. Why not.