My Desk Is A Work Of Art

I don't understand people who are neat. I know they exist, but they are like some exotic form of life, like bacteria that live under the ocean at steam vents, or deep underground in Antarctica. How do people like this stay organized? How do they keep their desk clean? How can they keep track of all the paper in their life? My desk attracts paper like a magnet attracts iron. Every once in awhile I bring out the trash bags and start tossing paper in them, or putting the important papers in file folders, and for a brief moment of time my desk becomes clean and neat.

It never lasts. Little piles of paper start to accumulate, and before I know it my desk looks like the aftermath of some natural disaster. A neat desk intimidates me. I have had bosses who kept a neat desk, making sure that there were no loose papers on their desk each night before they left work. I was afraid of them. I recognized in them a ruthlessness, a willingness to cut ties without remorse, that I do not have. After all, who knows what stray piece of paper may come in handy sometime in the future? Parting with a receipt, a memo, a document of any kind is hard for me, because I never know when I might need it again. People who can throw documents away with reckless abandon are much too confident, too self-assured, too domineering for me. They must assume that if they get rid of a document and they need it again, someone else will make them a copy. The world will rearrange itself to do their bidding, in other words.

Not me. I assume that every piece of paper holds the key to my eternal happiness, and that if I lose it I will be condemned to an eternity of fire and brimstone. That's why I let these things pile up in my life, and why it is agony to let go of them.

Isn't there a famous quote about a messy desk being the sign of a creative mind? Maybe that's why I like those piles of papers stacked everywhere, why I don't mind sorting through them several times a day to find something, why I can live with the inefficiency and disorganization. I'm creative; that's it.

Maybe I should look at my desk as a piece of modern art.

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