I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT
BY BRAD BYNUM • BRADB@NEWSREVIEW.COM • PHOTOS BY ERIC MARKS
Help! I’m buried in stuff and I can’t get out!
M
y life is a mess. My home is a mess. My office is a mess. And I’m too goddamned busy to fix the mess. I live in a state of perpetual chaos. I work full-time here at the RN&R, forever pushing deadlines. I’m also a full-time grad student at the University of Nevada, Reno, and, as of last semester, a part-time instructor. I have a creative project—a rock band—that requires weekly rehearsals and all the attentions of managing a small business. All these occupations tend to generate stuff—newspapers, school papers, music equipment. All that stuff starts to pile up. I have a 9-year-old son who generates a trail of Legos, Star Wars toys and comic books as if by spontaneous generation. My girlfriend, Margot, is an artist and an archaeologist—which means she likes to bring home objects she finds on the side of the road either to paint or just because they’re fascinating curiosities. She has two daughters, aged 8 and 9, and they also generate a trail of stuff—clothes and toys and trash and more and more Legos. I have a dog who has an extensive collection of half-destroyed stuffed animals. I have a house I co-own with my ex, and we’re prepping it to put on the market in the spring, so there’s half a dozen improvement projects in various stages of incompletion. I have stacks of books, vinyl records, CDs, cassettes, DVDs, VHS tapes, and magazines that arrive in the mail and go unread. There are bills I can’t find. Books I can’t find. Clothes I’m too fat to wear. School papers I can’t find. Keys I can’t find. I waste hours and hours looking for things, scrounging around Margot’s house, hunting for my knit cap which somehow fell between the cushions of the couch.
Chaos theory Debbie Cox is the owner of an organizing company with a great acronym, Creative Home And Office Solutions (CHAOS). She’s a tall, striking redhead with a beatific air and the calming presence required to mediate a heated dispute about where the vinyl records should be kept. She’s a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers. She’s appeared as a consultant on the TV show Hoarding: Buried Alive. Before launching CHAOS in 2009, she worked as a corporate office manager. She owned a Moxie Java in south Reno and a consignment shop, Chaos to Cash, on Wells Avenue. “I was always one of the organized people, even as a child,” she said. “It’s either a trait you have or you don’t have. It’s a hard trait, I think, to learn. Being organized just meant that everything had to have its place.”
I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT CLUTTER OPINION
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NEWS
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GREEN
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FEATURE STORY
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Writer Brad Bynum and his girlfriend, Margot Choltco, were amazed at all the crap they had accumulated.
Things start to pile up. Dishes pile up. Dirty laundry piles up. Unread mail piles up. Piles pile up. The problem of having too many things is what we might call a first world problem. It’s like Charles Foster Kane, rich, bitter and old, wandering his house among his innumerable possessions, looking for some object he could imbue with the significance of lost innocence. One day—while cleaning up after the three children, the dog, and grossest and messiest of all, me—Margot decided that we needed professional help to get rid of our clutter. “If there wasn’t so much, I could do it,” she said. “It’s just so overwhelming, the amount that we have. It’s more than one day of 12 hours of purging and cleaning and organizing. It’s multiple steps and multiple days, and I don’t even know where to start. It’s like trying to find a black shirt in a pile of black clothes.”
ARTS&CULTURE
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ART OF THE STATE
continued ON page 14 |
FOODFINDS
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FILM
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MUSICBEAT
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NIGHTCLUBS/CASINOS
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THIS WEEK
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MISCELLANY
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JANUARY 14, 2016
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RN&R
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