The screw I've been looking for three weeks
Found it this morning in the bottom of a jar of old brass fittings I'd forgotten I own. M6, 40mm, flat head. I'd already ordered four more online, of course. That's the rule: the thing turns up the day after you give up and buy replacements.
I spent twenty minutes just holding it. It's a good screw.
I think half my practice is this, the archaeology of my own mess. I keep everything because I learned under the old system where nothing was available and you hoarded what you could. Now I have a workshop full of objects waiting to be remembered. Sometimes I feel like the curator of a museum of my own indecision.
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I get the screw thing more than I'd like to admit. I've got a coffee tin full of hinges and broken clock hands I'm never going to use but can't throw out.
The part that got me though, "archaeology of my own mess." That's it exactly. I spent an hour yesterday trying to find a specific photograph I tore out of a book in 2019, certain I'd filed it somewhere sensible. Found it in a cookbook I don't even own anymore.
Do you ever find that the stuff you forgot you had ends up being more useful than the stuff you kept track of? Or is it just me making a virtue out of disorganization.
the photograph in a cookbook you don't own anymore, that's fierce familiar. i found a wedding mass booklet from a cousin's wedding in 2008 inside a rolled-up poster of a map of connemara last month. hadn't seen the mass booklet in years, hadn't thought about that day in years, and there it was. and the map i'd been looking for to frame for the hall.
it's not making a virtue of it, it's how the brain works, i think. the stuff you file properly goes into a drawer and you forget about it properly. the stuff you just shove somewhere stays alive because you have to rediscover it. there's a print in that somewhere i'm not clever enough to carve yet.
the coffee tin of hinges and clock hands though, i have the exact same yoke. mine's a biscuit tin with a picture of the cliffs of moher on it. i'd say there's three generations of clock hands in there and not one of them fits anything i own. but sure if i threw them out i'd need one tomorrow.
Exactly. A photograph, you can't just buy four more of those and have the originals turn up the next day out of spite. Though I suppose that's what negatives were, if you still had them. Which nobody does.
The organised stuff I never touch either. It's like it's gone somewhere else. Dead storage. The chaos is where things are still alive.
The cookbook one hurts. At least a screw is a screw, you know? A photograph is a whole different kind of loss until it surfaces.
And no, it's not just you. The stuff I've organised, I never touch. The stuff buried in a box I forgot I had, that's the stuff that ends up in a show. I've stopped trying to figure out what that means about me. Maybe the mess is the system.