The Clutter

I was smiling the other morning. 

The Spring sun was poking through the industrial jaggness that is the horizon here in the burbs as a huge garbage truck pulls up outside, grabs our rubbish bin with an evil mechanical claw, hurls it into the air and slams it back onto the footpath.

I'm smiling at the surreal nature of this weekly ritual.

I'm smiling at the fact that I go to work to earn money so I can pay somebody to take away clutter that I paid for with money I earned. 

I'm smiling because I'm stupid and I know it.

If I bought less clutter, I could spend less time working and more time surfing or shooting surfing or writing about shooting and surfing and clutter.

Simple.

Not.

My clutter habit is deep seated, beginning with a childhood where money was spare and luxuries non-existent. Add to that a lifetime of exposure to advertising with luscious photography promising an illusory life of wonder.

And so The Clutter creeps back. A shirt, a lens, a fin on sale. A DVD, a CD an MP3 here and there. Some new wine glasses. A bottle of red. A bottle of white. A bottle of authentic Canadian maple syrup for those pancakes only eaten once because I'm trying to get healthier and fittier. A bunch of film in the refrigerator past it's use by date for a variety of cameras busted out once in a while.

Clutter.

And so I do the Spring Clean again.

Until next year.