Spring Cleaning

There is an OBAMA LAVA LAMP??

People, I am just as excited to see a change in administration as the next person, but this flood of kitsch Obama-related knickknacks has. got. to. stop. The multitude of Obama memorabilia has reminded me yet again why baseball cards are single-handedly responsible for the clutter in people homes.

(Side note: Why isn’t anyone/anything ever double-handedly responsible? The phrase “single-handedly responsible” seems to place a great deal of unnecessary blame on people missing a limb. You know what that is? Prejudice. And I will have no part in that. From here on out, responsibility knows no number of limbs in my vocabulary! Hazzah!)

I have seen enough Clean House episodes to know that people often hang on to things they don’t need because they believe that these items will be of value some day. You know why this is, right? Because someone once decided that he would pay an astronomical amount of money for an original Babe Ruth baseball card, even though a brand new exact replica of that Babe Ruth baseball card could be created for a handful of pennies. (Which is in no way similar to paying top dollar for a pair of Jimmy Choo’s, so don’t even go there…Sue…Denise….) And so a culture of clutter was born.

The truth is that 99.9% of the junk we keep in our closets, basements, and attics is just that: junk. It is the detritus of our lives and the lives of our family members who think they are doing us a favor by donating to us the things they are afraid to throw away themselves. My guess is that people purchasing the Obama Lava Lamp must think that these floating wax blobs hovering mere inches over a light bulb with a plastic presidential seal of our new president plastered to the base will eventually be worth something some day.

It won’t.

(And if it is, then my vintage Jimmy Choo’s better wipe the floor with your presidential lava lamp.)

This means twenty years from now two people will stand over a box of soon-to-be refuse in their basement trying to decide whether they should keep or toss the dusty Obama-fire-hazard-in-waiting-lamp. And you know what they will probably decide to do? They will probably decide to give it to their kids because they won’t want to throw away a perfectly good lava lamp. And these people will probably be my in-laws.

Crap.