I love nestling in my comfy chair after a stick-to-your-ribs breakfast consisting of a bacon egg & cheese omelet, toast with lots of real butter, and hot coffee. I began to succumb to the warm glow of satiation and comfort. The need to feed was turned off, and the need to sleep had just about taken control of my life. You can tell that you’re ready for a nap in many ways. Your mind begins to get cloudy, thought patterns become uncollected, and your eyes seem to get heavy with the upper lids feeling like they weigh 10 pounds! The thought of completing all the tasks you planned to do becomes so monumental that you don’t know where to begin. I hurried off to my “Comfy Chair,” as I was just settling into a glorious nap, I heard my wife yell out, “Joel, you promised to organize the shelves in the basement today and pick up the floor so we don’t trip on anything!”
The movie “Home Alone” features the scariest basement I have ever witnessed in a PG-rated film; the furnace looked like it would eat you alive! My basement has its own unique style that might make it into an “Urban Legend.” With great trepidation, I went down the stairs to the basement. One side was finished, and life could exist, but the other was another story.
I opened the door to the “Catacombs.” This is a dark, scary, musty basement area where we store things we do not need, have not used in decades, and won’t use in the future. We rarely go into the catacombs; it’s a little scary and overloaded with stuff. We all have a little hoarder in us, which is where it lives in my house.
There are so many hidden treasures including my childhood baseball glove, ice-fishing equipment, collectable items, and past gifts screaming to be re-gifted next Christmas. There are also lots of outdated non-perishable items. If they are non-perishable, why do they have an expiration date? There are a lot of books that have been read and some that need to be read, when time allows. Historic items like VCRs and disk players, cassette players and cassettes, reel-to-reel recorders, analog TVs, and plug-in non-roam phones are corded! There is even a large rectangular box that was here when we moved in, it says “Vatican # IIIXXII. We never opened it; it might be the corpse of a past pope or something like that.
There is an assortment of garage sale furniture, mismatched socks, shredded dog toys, and a box of fast-food promotional toys in various stages of decomposition. Dozens of musty old beanie babies® and other stuffed animals from my daughter’s youth that cover a complete shelving unit. I found boxes of puzzles marked “missing pieces”, rusted metal toy trucks & cars from childhood. I found an assortment of my wife’s magazines and unopened cookbooks. I am sure there are a lot of great recipes in them, but we seem to eat the same stuff every week.
I grabbed an empty box and began filling it with useless items. When I filled it with enough items to make it look like I had completed my task, I took it upstairs and proudly set it down on the kitchen floor. My wife looked at the contents and stated, “This is all my stuff. I want to keep all of it, just in case I might have a need for it in the future.” “Okay. I answered, I will take this back down and work on it more tomorrow. Right now, I need my nap; this is exhausting work.” I once again nestled into my comfy chair and prepared for the rush of REM sleep. As I was just about to drift off, I heard a quiet and then escalating rumble. It was my tummy letting me know it was lunchtime. I just hate busy days. My nap will have to wait until after lunch.
