Today has been meh.

The usual crap. Sleep, eat, fuck around online. Letting the days go by, water flowing under.

Managed to get all the way through an episode of Hoarding : Buried Alive. I tried before, but it was so depressing and upsetting that I gave up halfway through and watched something else.

But a few days later, it occurred to me that I might have jumped ship at the most depressing point of the show, and if I had just stuck with it and watched the whole thing, I might have gotten to a happy ending.

So I made a mental note to try to tough it out next time, and sure enough, even though it was very intensely bad for a while, the show ended happily with the hoarder in a clean, decent house.

And this lady was the most horrifying kind of hoarder (outside end-stage pet hoarders, I suppose…), and that is the filthy hoarder. No neat clean stacks of newspapers or even just piles of nicknacks or old clothing or other objects to which one might have a sentimental attachment.

Nope. Just garbage everywhere. Rotting. Cockroaches living the good life (for them). Thank God television can’t convey smell. It was just unthinkably awful, and I am saying that as a slobby guy myself.

I mean, look around this bedroom that is the center of my so-called life and there are books and other bits of reading material everywhere. Partly that is due to lack of bookshelves, but mostly it had to do with indifference. They seem fine where they are.

But I almost never eat in my room, and that is because I do not want to introduce anything that rots into this space. Clutter is one thing. Filth is another. Clutter does not bother me (perhaps I have clutter blindness?) but filth freaks me the hell out.

Anyhow, the lady had it really, really bad. But there was a ray of hope in her delusional state : her defenses has a critical weakness. She just kept saying she was a lazy housekeeper or that she just hated housework.. that she had just “let it get away from her” and “never caught up”.

Mind you, this is a woman who had eggs from 2003 in her fridge. Her bedroom was one huge pile of read and discarded romance novels. Everywhere you looked there was garbage, or things turned into garbage by years of neglect and roaches.

But still, if her delusional structure, the one she used to protect herself from realizing just how bad things had gotten, was that she was just too lazy and did not like housework, then she had no defense when the people connected with the show arrived to do all the work for her.

And so as horrible and life-threatening her home’s condition was (they found the mummified remains of a copperhead, a quite poisonous snake, in her bedroom. It probably came in looking for the roaches.), her hoarding was a lot more treatable than for those people who are sure they will eventually use every single thing in their hoard, or for whom every single piece of seeming garbage has a story and a memory attached.

So the clean-out team did not encounter too much resistance. I was fully expecting her to have a massive freak-out once things started actually leaving, but she took it quite well.

And by the end of the episode, her house was spotless and roomy and quite lovely, actually. She had a lovely big half-circular kitchen window that I especially liked. Great view of the back yard, accented with a light yellow stripe that made the whole thing more sunshiney.

As I have mentioned before, I find hoarding fascinating. And obviously I am not alone in that, given the number of shows devoted to it.

Partly it is because it is so sad, so tragic, so very wrought with pathos (and so very… visual) that it cannot help but to tug at your heartstrings. Or mine, at least. I suppose another sort of person might just say “That person is gross. ” and just abandon them as impossibly icky and weird.

But I feel for these people. They did not set out to be how they are, and their hoarding is a response to depression that I can well understand.

Every hoarder is also a compulsive shopper. They buy things because buying things makes them feel better for a little while. Their hoard is therefore often simply the byproduct of their continuing to constantly buy things and get that feeling of acquisition.

What makes them hoarders and not just compulsive shoppers is their inability to let things go. If it was just an addiction to buying things, once the thing was bought, they would lose interest in it and could give it away or throw it out, even.

But no, that would require admitting that their purchases are basically meaningless, and hoarders need that feeling that their purchases serve some purpose.

Everything they buy is something they are sure they will use… eventually. And that gives them the good feeling of having increased their wealth. They have made a valid and useful material acquisition. They have new things that will come in handy some day. That gives them a good feeling, and they are so deeply addicted to that feeling that they will not just do but believe anything that they have to in order to keep those good feelings coming.

That is part of what makes their stories so compelling, because they seem like extreme, cautionary examples of the very acquisition based society in which we all live.

Feel bad? Buy something! It doesn’t matter what it is, a Slurpee or a sedan, a hot dog or a house, a trip to the mall or a trip around the world.

The solution is always acquisition first and foremost. People of even modest income have enough in excess of their basic needs (housing, food, clothing, etc) that they don’t really know what to do with it. So it goes into buying things they do not need simply for the pleasure of buying them. Especially women.

So in a way, we are a hoarder society. Even someone as poor as me looks around and wonders how he ended up with all this goddamned STUFF sometimes.

The difference with me is that I am not terribly attached to most of it. I could sell or give away at least half of these books and never miss them.

Then again, who knows what kind of a hoard I would have if I had more money?

And how big is YOUR hoard?