The March Hare

Hello. My name is Amethyst Vineyard, and I am compulsively messy.

It started when I was young. Really young. My mother used to tell me to clean up my room and I would forget to do it, and then when I could hear her coming down the hall to check on me I remembered and so I scooped everything up and hid it badly. And then she would find it all and do the worst thing: sit there and make me hold up each item in my room one by one so that she could tell me where it went. And then watch me put all of it in its proper place. This is a woman whose car perpetually smells like vinegar because of all the spilled coffee and rotting french fries ground into the carpet.

In high school I lived in a dormitory. That's where I learned that laundry, since it's going to get dirty again anyway, doesn't actually need to be put away.

Then I was out on my own. Every time I've moved, I've found this strange ground-covering of ephemera that I never noticed while I lived in it; a soup of feathers, broken doll limbs, dusty bits of metal and wire, sewing needles, scrap paper, melted crayons, drinking glasses, batteries, things I never knew I had in the first place. Shop-Vacs are great for that, by the way.

Because of me, the house we live in looks kind of like a crack house. The stoop is littered with cans and cigarette butts and soggy cigarette packs. There are two broken bicycles around the side, and one broken car in the driveway. There are beer bottles in the bushes (not my fault). There are towels (no, I do not know why they are outside) slowly rotting in the grass.

Am I missing some important component in my genetic makeup that makes me incapable of a)seeing the mess in the first place and b)actually fixing it? Today I went out and bought two planters and some playsand and made myself a front- and back-yard smoking station. I raked all of the detritus into a pile in the back. I have plans for removing all non-functional vehicles from the environs, plans just itching to be enacted.

I will get better. If it means posting dorky lists all over my house, reminding my hopelessly untrainable brain to do what it takes to not live in a spiralling storm of my own garbage, I will do it. There is more at stake here than just possibly contracting salmonella. There is Clurg's sanity to think of.

With God as my witness, I will never crumple up trash in my hand and throw it in my yard again!