All I want is a room somewhere.

Isn't this a nice office? Of course it's fake, an AI-generated artwork, but nice for all that. It doesn't have a lot of those bizarre AI details, like a D&D monster crawling out of a potted plant. Although a potted plant seems to be holding the curtain open. I can't quite figure how the window works, and if it's in a city building, it probably doesn't work at all. Plus, it's time to complain to the landlord. The floorboards are coming up. 

On the whole, though, it is a lot less messy than my actual home office, the box of files in the middle of the floor notwithstanding. It doesn't have a skid of toilet paper and another of paper towels from the warehouse store. There's no exercise bike sitting idle in a corner. It has no cabinet full of dog snacks and dog-care items. While it does have two computers, it does not have two printers (one of which is only hanging on until its toner is used up). There are some stacks of paper, but nothing like my desk, where notes and pens vie for space with books, hand lotion, wires, and small tools. And there is no complete dining room set, disassembled, as in my office (for reasons too complicated to get into here).

Alas! My mother was right. For years she threatened to get a big saw and cut my bedroom off the house. She foresaw an Oscar Madison-like existence for me, buried under piles of junk. For a time after I left home that was not the case, because I didn't have that much stuff. Then I met my wife, and we got married, and we lived in an apartment, so there was little space to pile up the junk. When we got our house, I was determined to keep things orderly and not bring shame unto my family. 

That lasted a while. But things start to pile up. When I started working from home, the real disaster struck. I was too busy to neaten up as I would at a real office, because as a freelancer, any work that wasn't paying work was a waste of time. So my office became the dumping ground for things that fit nowhere else. And here I am. 

If you hear a rumor of a writer being buried by his own stuff, don't jump to the conclusion that it is me -- book people tend to be packrats as a class. But it could be me. And if I were to go under a pile of books, then I shall have died as I lived, crushed by an endless avalanche of words.