Moving a Huge Pile of Junk to Nowhere - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Moving a Huge Pile of Junk to Nowhere
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I’ve been moving all the furniture in my house. If there are any psychologists in the room, I authorize them to diagnose this, as long as they don’t link it to some dark sexual urges. I have moved a huge three-seater sofa that was obviously not designed to be moved. I don’t remember how it got from the manufacturer’s to here, but, considering its size, its weight that equals 200 dead elephants, and the fact that there’s nothing on it to  hold on to, like it’s a 90s top model, it’s clear that it was made with the idea of keeping it at the factory for life. Then I moved some bookshelves without a clear objective, beyond leaving some surreal scratches on the wooden floor, and finally I put a coffee table in the center of the living room, with a couple of plants on top. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve bought a plant. I’ll probably have to buy a girlfriend next to get along with them.

I have a serious hand injury that, according to what I have just been told, will see me in the operating theater shortly; I have a few weeks to learn to write with my feet — please acknowledge the elegance of my choice of anatomy. The injury discourages me from making any kind of effort, so I have started pushing furniture around the house compulsively, as if I were blocking doors to defend myself from the assault of twelve Kosovar Albanians armed to the teeth.

The intelligence of writers’ is overrated. Alas, we’re pretty dumb.

As I finished setting up the living room, I made a design decision that has actually been ideological. Is there anything more boomer than television? I haven’t watched television in ages: what’s the point of having the television in the center of the living room as if it were a shrine? We all made a mistake in the 20th century by giving that thing the most honored position in living rooms and bedrooms. We would have been better off if we had given that importance to the vacuum cleaner, or at least that’s what my mother thought when I was 15 years old. About television and about just about everything, I share the stance of Ogden Nash: “Progress is a fine thing, but it’s gone on long enough.” Be that as it may, the best decision I made today was to arrange the furniture as if there were no TV. My bookshelves now take center stage. I don’t understand why I didn’t do this before, being that my job is to sell books, and not movies or stupid TV shows.

Rearranging the house has had a strange influence on our mood. Now I have much more room to walk around, I can read on the couch and have the sun on the veranda sweetly warm my neck, I can find absolutely nothing in the right drawer the first time, and I know that every morning in the dark I’ll break a different toe on the new bookshelf I’ve put in the hallway, which has now become a trap for buffalos. One of the advantages of changing everything around is that it forces you to be vigilant not to kill yourself banging into anything, it makes you feel alive, and it doesn’t hurt, because the possibility of amputation of a hand already has me emotionally on death’s doorstep; my mother scolded me yesterday for mentioning the amputation option, she says it’s an exaggeration and it may well be, but my strategy with medicine is always the same: if you put yourself through the worst, then getting four stab wounds in the tendon that allows you to move your big toe might seem like child’s play.

Otherwise, the only problem I’ve encountered is in my office. As much as I’ve moved all the furniture around (who the hell put an exercise bike in here with coats hanging off of the handles?), it still feels like I need to make a move. I think my professional life has consisted of faithfully following Thomas A. Edison’s advice: “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

It is fashionable for those approaching 50 to start bragging about how much they learn from the new generations. Until now, the only thing I had learned from them was how to send a WhatsApp to a friend a meter away, how to do the shopping from bed, and how to pick up ten girls at the same time. But I admit that there is something else they do very well. When reality doesn’t agree with them, instead of changing their habits, they make up another reality. I’ve done it and now I feel much better since I consider order at home a fascist imposition, an absurd convention, a way to stifle my creativity. My disorder is not a disorder, it is a symptom of intellectual restlessness, an epitome of freedom, an explosion of genius, something that the rest of the mortals cannot understand.

The theory is wonderful. Now pray that my mother doesn’t pass by the house.

Itxu Díaz
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Itxu Díaz is a Spanish journalist, political satirist, and author. He has written 10 books on topics as diverse as politics, music, and smart appliances. He is a contributor to The Daily Beast, The Daily Caller, National Review, American Conservative, and Diario Las Américas in the United States, as well as a columnist at several Spanish magazines and newspapers. He was also an adviser to the Ministry for Education, Culture, and Sports in Spain.
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