Regarding The Time When I Had Too Much Desiccant

So a couple years ago my love got a bag of desiccant. By legitimate means. And for purposes society would generally approve of, too. I’ve had enough of these scurrilous rumors. I don’t know how these things get started. But then I also don’t know how to spell “desiccant”. I’m going with what Wikipedia tells me. Wikipedia also tells me “a desiccant is a hygroscopic substance that induces or sustains a state of dryness in its vicinity; it is the opposite of a humectant”. I haven’t even been awake an hour yet. What’s Wikipedia doing talking to me like that? Have some consideration.

Anyway, this was only a bag of desiccant. Like what you get in a tiny paper envelope that you’re warned not to eat with your new shoes. What stands out about this is we had a lot of it. A big bag full. I should manage expectations. I’m prone to hyperbole that people take literally, like when I said the styrofoam packing-peanuts incident covered the green-roof part of campus to a depth of eighteen inches. So when I say it was a big bag of desiccant I realize I’m leading you to think it was something at least twelve percent outlandish. Like, a bag of desiccant large enough to roll down the street and crush the auto-care place with its inspirational despair sign.

They’re still warning us about buying back our past. I hope the person in charge of picking a message that’s inspirational yet filled with dread at life hasn’t gone on sick leave or something.

This was a much more reasonable-sized bag. Big enough to hold comfortably with one standard-issue hand. About what you would need if you wanted to make a loaf of sourdough bread all wrong. Still, it’s a lot, considering how little desiccant we need. It was more than we would need at once even if we were eating all our shoes. So we had trouble once the bag came to our attention and we figured we should do something about it.

I had a working plan. I was figuring to let it rest on a horizontal surface until it broke. (I mean the bag. I can’t bear it when horizontal surfaces break.) The dinner table looked like a good choice. The bag was a decent prop for holding trade paperbacks open, at least if I wasn’t too near the center of the book. But understand that I have a condition where I have to stack stuff on horizontal surfaces. I’ve sometimes stacked stuff on top of books I’m currently reading and have left open to page 184. It runs in my family. Neither of my parents have ever gotten to page 186 of a book without a major cleaning project either. My love does not put up with this nonsense. This is good, as otherwise I would someday die in a tragic desiccant-and-book avalanche. Once it was clear I was fine with leaving the bag on the dinner table until I died of old, dry age, the quest for what to do with it was on.

The obvious plan: put it up on Freecycle. Freecycle is a great web site that lets you match usable stuff you don’t need with people in your city, even in your neighborhood, who will never pick it up. We’ve used it before. It’s given us many chances to argue the morals of someone who made the cruel false claim they would take a couple pressure-treated wood 4x4s “Tuesday”. They were our pressure-treated wood 4x4s and we had the receipts to prove it, so let’s stop with the rumors. They’re on the side of the driveway if you want them.

So what did we have to lose by trying? Not the bag of desiccant, for one. Someone in the neighborhood promised to come by the next morning and pick it up, and we promised to pretend to believe them. We didn’t figure on getting up to meet them. It takes time for us to get ready to have Wikipedia tell us stuff. Never mind how hard it would be to give a thing to a person who would like that thing. So my love set the bag inside a plastic freezer bag, because it was raining pretty steady. We didn’t know what would happen if we exposed a full bag of desiccant to an autumnal rain, but also figured we didn’t need that kind of trouble too. We set it between the screen and front doors where our imaginary Freecycle partner could pick it up.

And yet! The next morning there was some kind of noise at the door. And the bag, and the bag inside it, and the desiccant inside, were gone afterwards. We have no explanation for this phenomenon. But we do have our suspicions.

This doesn’t have anything to do with the bag of desiccant, or the rain, but it turns out posting any picture at all seems to make stuff more popular and I’m still not sure if I want to include that photo of the auto care place’s sign above.

Deep suspicions. Because we’ve been in the rainy season. The day we set the bag of desiccant out the area got an inch and a half of rain. The goldfish in the pond were asking if we needed quite this much rain. But a couple hours after parties unknown to us took this bag, the rain stopped. I’m not saying there is someone altering the mid-Michigan weather using a not-that-large bag of desiccant. I only ask how we can say for sure that’s not going on.

What Are The Limits To Organization?

Is it ever possible to be too organized? Of course it is. Imagine you were to get so organized that you put all of the matter and energy in the universe together in a single, infinitesimally small pile. This would promptly cause a new Big Bang, obliterating this universe and creating a new one with potentially quite different laws. Perhaps life would be possible in this new universe, but under very different laws. We might see something like the knights in a chess game moving two spaces in one direction and then two crosswise in a single turn. Or there might be even madder consequences, like gravity being replaced by a system of emotional bonds and obligations.

So there are limits to organization. And this is good as it takes the pressure off us to achieve perfection. If we think really hard about how a new-created universe might work — might tic-tac-toe be played with + signs and little diamonds instead of O’s and X’s? — it takes the pressure off us to achieve adequacy. At least that’s my excuse and I know my love understands while glaring, pained, at my side of the room.

And in practice there’s limits to organization even before you get to universe-wrecking consequences. For example, stuff disappears when it’s where it belongs. Consider that box of paperclips that would be useful for clipping paper together. If it were possible to open its plastic case without breaking off the tabs you’re supposed to use to open it. And which wouldn’t open even if you did break the tabs off. It sits on the table for months, maybe years. Everyone knows exactly where it is. People walking past the house come to a halt and stare in the window, waving more passers-by over to point and stare at the paperclips. And that takes some doing, because they have to get past some really prickly bushes to get up to the window.

But there it sits, ready and demanding attention, ready to provide paperclip services just in case we ever open it. Sometimes it moves a bit, trying to sidle up to the remote control and judge whether it can prey upon the appliance-related implement. Maybe it tries to conceal the chunk of hematite I got for $1.49 from the science store like twenty years ago that hasn’t yet grown into a collection of pretty rocks. Anyone could find the box even if the house were blacked out and your eyes held closed by rogue paperclips.

Ah, but then comes the day we finally organize the place. We take the box of paperclips and find the sensible spot for them: in one of the drawers of the side table where we keep the stamps, blank envelopes, stationery, and the stapler that we can’t find staples for. Come back and we find the table is gone. There’s hints of where it had been, indentations in the rug and all that, but no hint of table. It’s as though the idea of horizontal surfaces has been eliminated from the world. I’d write a stern letter to somebody about this, but can’t find the stationery. And when I get back from that the rug is gone too. They’ve snuck off to the game room and hidden behind the game. The game is a 1979 Williams Tri-Zone pinball. I can find them by the chuckling. Furniture may be well-camouflaged, but it is only two-thirds as clever as it thinks it is.

I don’t usually get so much stuff lost when organizing. I mean except when cleaning up for Thanksgiving, a time when we get so busy tidying stuff up that we can lose bookshelves, kitchen cabinets, and back in 2014 the guest bathroom. There’s not a hint there even ever was a second bathroom in the house. The home would even be architecturally senseless with a second one. That cleaning-up job lasted for hours before it was all chaos again.

But I find my own natural limits. I tend to figure I’ve got things as organized as reasonable when I hold up two socks. They look like they’re the same color in the dim light of the morning when I might have to go out somewhere. In sunlight they’re nothing like the same color. One is a navy blue, the other is an enraged red squirrel holding a penknife. But when I reach that point I ponder whether any two socks are “a pair” of socks, even if they haven’t got anything in common except they are the socks without anything in common. The conclusion of this is that any socks can be a pair of socks and therefore they can be put into the pile of pairs of socks. When I get to reasoning like this you can imagine the shape of my DVD shelf. It is a rhombic triacontahedron.

The case of paperclips won’t open because there’s cellophane tape holding together the sides. I can’t find the cellophane either.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The … alternate index? I think that’s the one supposed to report today. Well, the alternate Another Blog, Meanwhile index dropped three points today after their old-time radio podcast had this interesting late-70s adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth hosted by Tom Bosley For Some Reason. And I’m not supposed to tell you what the mainstream blog did today but you already know because this whole alternate-reporting thing is just them being silly.

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