The Universe and Garage Reorganization

There is a deep, but ultimately puzzling, sense of relief coursing through my mind and body as I sit at the kitchen table typing. I will make an assumption and guess there might be two questions springing into existence for anyone reading my latest semi-coherent verbal offal. The first being what in the hell has this idiot come up now? The second being that if Beach Bum has not finally lost what tiny portion of his mind that works what could cause him to feel this way?

Well, there could several other questions associated with my first statement but the only one I will answer outright to alleviate any worries about me delving into the kinky side of life is that no, there is nothing remotely sexual about what I am feeling. But to provide an answer, which is certified family and office safe I will have to backtrack.

See, as most of you already know I work third shift, which runs from eleven o'clock at night to seven in the morning. Because of this abnormal schedule, my weekend begins Friday morning and ends on Sunday night when I must return to the old grindstone. Since everyone living here at my house is either at work or at school on Friday this provides me the opportunity, as my lovely spouse describes it, to get some chores done.

Now, unfortunately, there is never a lack of chores to be done around my house. You name the task and I can most assuredly say there is some part of my home or yard that desperately needs just such a corrective action. However during the long winter months laundry is the usual default chore I embrace just for the fact that it absolutely has to be done and that there are long lazy breaks between me washing a load of filthy clothes, transferring them to the dryer, to finally folding the newly spring fresh smelling items. With the return of warmer temperatures and longer days the specter of yard work and spring reorganizing has come to the forefront.

My self-imposed troubles began a couple of weekends ago when I up and did something miraculous and started working in the backyard without any prompting from my wife. And while there is still much to be done, progress is being made---at least in my eyes. You have to remember everything in the universe is relative and I am sure my neighbors would say something different. 

Yesterday morning my wife asked that I begin the annual garage reorganization. Since mundane consistency is an inbred hobgoblin of stunted minds I readily agreed and actually looked forward to tackling the problem. This mainly came from my military years that ingrained a need to keep everything orderly and clean. 

I kept this attitude until I stepped into the garage and began to examine the degree of chaos that existed. Assorted minutia had literally flowed off the steel storage shelves down onto the cement floor. Making matters even worse stuff important to my wife had long since been mixed in with the other collection of junk she gives to charity. From past, painful, experience I have come to know that it is best not to make the mistake of misidentifying particular items and then keeping or taking off the wrong ones,

Adding to the problem was my wife's collection of oddly shaped cooking items and unused kitchen counter appliances. Both groups take up valuable space and if I truly wore the pants in my family most of it would have been long since taken to the recycle center. Harsh and cruel you might be thinking right now. The thick coat of dust covering the vast majority of these items screams to the universe years of sitting unused.

But as they say, the journey of a thousand miles begins with just one step and I jumped into the task. Two hours later, I realized that with all the uncertainty on what items were keepers and what could be tossed I had, at best, rearranged the existing mess. That is when a calming sense of of relief flooded my being to the point I was lifted up and for one belief moment was unified with the universe. The cosmos was telling me that the job was simply too big and diabolically complex for my puny male mind to comprehend.

So what does a person do when the universe itself overrules the task your wife assigned you? You grab a beer and begin to type out some rambling verbal essay describing the situation. Then hope your wife had a good day at work and finds the situation just a funny when she comes home and see the stuff still in disarray.

The steel shelf after two hours of futile reorganization.

One of my wife's culinary items after I wiped off the dust. It has something to do with "cake pops."