Chotskies

Well, I am back from vacation. The dump looks pretty much the way I left it: crap everywhere.

The Cape beach house where we stayed was typically furnished with yard sale treasures: ugly-but-usable furniture. You could not find a comfortable chair unless you sat on the back deck. The beds were small and uncomfortable. The walls and every surface were festooned with pictures and nick-nacks of nautical subjects, especially lighthouses and seagulls. The owner apparently had a "thing" for clocks. The house contained at least thirty clocks of various size shape and design. The only one that actually worked tocked loudly in the living room, reminding us that precious seconds of our nasty brutish and short lives were ebbing away with desperate certitude.
Mercifully, the gong was broken, so when we went to bed we were not aroused from our boozy slumber, forced to acknowledge that another unreclaimable hour had slipped into eternity.

Chotskies, I have concluded, are truly nothing more than junk. They are useless, pervasive and they litter up people's lives. When you think of all the useless trinkets that we collect - and save - you begin to realize that keepsakes and worthless memorabilia are actually a sign of mental disorder.
Dust magnets that fog up our thinking, keeping us mired in the shadowy past when we should be striving to engage the here and now.

I was at my desk in the office pondering these immutable truths when Lardass came in for his morning coffee break. I told him that I decided to get rid of all the junk in my life. He surveyed the office slowly, noting the faded picture of Ty Cobb, the Dump Manager of the Year trophies, my "Biggest Pumpkin" award, and the various detritus of my life, and remarked, "So, where does the dump manager take his trash?"