Can we be honest with each other for a moment? Our junk drawers and oddities boxes. Our various rapscallion items, gathered over a lifetime, that don’t go anywhere else, but so deserve to go together. Somewhere, always, there is this drawer, bin, pile, or box whose sole, noble purpose is to house the otherwise unhoused: mismatched objects that you kind-of-can’t-not-collect during a human life.
The mishmosh is more often unintentional than intentional, but an inevitable byproduct of living a life: existing through eras as everything changes around you, hanging and taking down pictures, moving in and leaving places, meeting and losing people, imagining into the future about what may or may not happen. They’re honest catch-alls. They’re the grease trap in our barbecue; our life’s lint trap.
I’ve gotten rid of or given away so much in my life. So much. And yet these sanctuaries for randomness and truth live on, virtually untouched. If anything, I’m slowly adding to them.
And actually it gives me peace to know they exists. At one and the same time, they proudly (literally) signify the messiness and randomness of life, and offer a whole pile of potential solutions to it. What better feeling might I have, some day, than the vindication that the Ethernet cable I kept for all those years suddenly has a singular purpose. And nothing else will do.
There are many places the randomness of our objects, explicitly and implicitly chosen, show up. Consider that what ends up together does go together. Whatever reason things come together, there’s a magic that emerges from every particular collection. What’s the vibe of your junk drawer? What’s the energy in your oddities box? Or the unnecessary items you tote around every single day?
Some items that live together in boxes with me in my apartment*:
An old sock of my dad’s that he used to gift wrap an item many years ago, which says in permanent marker, “To Jess From Dad;” Clips and pins and sticky things and special little useful things — I imagine — whose time has not yet come, or maybe has passed — you never know; many adapters of all sorts because I have lived through the full internet era so far, a rubber stamp, so much velcro, more than one bent nail, instructions, and so on (can’t spill all the beans!). A Y2K New Years Eve clapper; a ticket stub from a 2002 Jimmy Eat World concert; my deceased grandmother’s Safeway card that I keep meaning to use.
*Please share some of your random items that go together in the comments <3
These items are both precious and pointless and it’s a human gift to hold that tension.
And I think these items somehow appreciate being together, delighting as much in their collective randomness as I do. It is lonely to be an only. But when you’re a collection of onlies? When you’re unlike anything around you, though you may be inherently valuable, you also become relatively valuable. A proud member of a random collection that offers vim and assures longevity.
Look at that box or bin now and tell me it isn’t artists’ colony or awkward party of lovable weirdoes just having the best time. Deep down we know it, and that’s why we keep them. It’s part of our human nature to accept the mishmosh — to give it a home. It’s our beautiful ability to find the continuity in the messiness — because it is us. These boxes are the evidence of the unkempt, untied, unfinished, ungovernable part of all of us. Deep down we know this and love this.
A few of the items in my bag right now:
A small, bendable rainbow skeleton
Smooth, flat sunstone
Hair clip I’ve never used and will never use
Medicated eczema ointment
My 5-year old niece and I went out to a pumpkin patch a few months ago and packed our purses:
There is a uniformity that emerges from the randomness, a strange order amidst the chaos. You’ll wind all the wires up into neat nests and put them in a single baggie (though you still won’t get rid of them). You’ll clear everything out of the box and dust it, then put everything back in. Maybe you’ll inventory and marvel. There is a care we give to these drawers and boxes - let’s admit it. Because they’re our junk. They’re us.
When I was eight, I recited from memory a favorite poem for the whole school: Shel Silverstein’s Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, who “will not take the garbage out.” It’s a gossipy prose that combs through Sarah’s — all of our — trash. Each putrid item piling onto the one before it, growing ever more unwieldy the longer they decompose together. Eventually, the pile reaches across the whole US and buries Sarah alive. I guess it’s a cautionary tale about kids and chores, but it’s just as much an homage to rubbish — a delicious inventory of the power of randomness. The sum of the pungent parts is so much greater than “garbage:”
Coffee grounds, potato peelings, / Brown bananas, rotten peas, chunks of sour cottage cheese / With bacon rinds and chicken bones, drippy ins of ice cream cones / Prune pits, peach pits, orange peel / Gluppy glumps of cold oat meal, pizza crust and withered greens / And soggy beans and tangerines and crust of black burned buttered toast / And gristly bits of beefy roast / greasy napkins, cookie crumbs / Globs of gooey bubble gums, cellophane from green baloney, rubbery blubbery macaroni, peanut butter, caked and dry / Curdled milk and crusts of pie, moldy melons, dried-up mustard, eggshells mixed with lemon custard / Cold french fries and rancid meat, yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat.
I have a habit of dropping worn, almost-worn clothes, and other sundry items into a single pile in the corner of my bedroom, which my husband and I fondly refer to as my hamster nest. I build the nest over a few days, maybe a week at a time, before I dismantle it. But in researching hamsters nests (this entailed remembering Silk and Satin, the two teddy bear hamsters we owned as kids in the 90s), I believe this term is inaccurate. Hamsters usually nest into a relatively uniform natural substances. The nest I create has much more randomness — that is its magic. It’s a Koh Phangan Full Moon party. It’s a fleeting collection, with an energy that shifts. That’s the fun of it. It’s part of who I am.
We could dive so much deeper into the kinds of collections and that animals make, squirrel away, etc! Another time perhaps.. But one amazing creature I have to honor is the Bowerbird and their capability to collect random items of a single color to appoint their most gorgeous nest. Please enjoy the master of nature David Attenborough exploring some Australian Bowerbirds’ nests - you have to see it to believe it.
If you don’t and have never had one of these collections, I would really love to meet you.
What goes together?
I love this and it has stayed with me - stirring up questions about what I squirrel away and why....The top drawer of my dresser is "devoted" to stuff I can't discard in the moment, and it regularly becomes full to overflowing. Periodically, I sort through, throw away, put somewhere else, until it's almost bare. But It has an appetite of its own....within a matter of weeks, it's chock full again! It's my personal diary, objects that connect me to my past, to longings and dreams, to intentions...
Love it! Reminded me of that photographer who takes photos of the contents of second graders pockets. Its never really random. Sometimes everything in a kids pocket is a car, or all things the same color. Sometimes only food. Or only sticks. Cant recall her name.
I have studied my own “collections” as a way to find my voice in painting. Amazing how many breadcrumbs we leave for ourselves on the path to discovering what we like. And what we like is the door to the creative source. So I was like, I dont really collect things. Then I really looked. I have unconsciously hoarded beads for decades.
Curly or straight? Heavy or light? Cool or warm? Savory or sweet? Its an endless sea of clues we leave for ourselves.
Love this newsletter!🦋