ANOTHER BLAST FROM THE PAST

I wrote this piece about the desk sometime ago, and of course it was only published online. So I doubt many people got a chance to read it. So here it is, "The Desk" thing, and I live to blog another day.

The Desk

My apartment is clean and orderly. I am at last worthy of my desk.

One of the shamefully exquisite joys of this life is how our material goods can define us. You may suck as a human being, but to a lot of people you suck a lot less if you have that ski chalet in Kitzbuhle or that Gulfstream private jet.

But we have to take what we can get in this world. Some of us are zillionaires, some of us are doing pretty good and some of us, like me, have only an antique ... rolltop ... desk.

The desk first came into my life about 15 years ago when my father gave it to my mother for her birthday. It was like something out of a Rockwell painting, all solid oak and sturdy craftsmanship, as straightforward as a firm handshake. I began plotting Mom's death as soon as I saw it.

Sure, that may seem like appalling behavior from a son, but Mom and I had had about 25 good years together, and I figured that was plenty of time. Besides, how often does an antique ... rolltop ... desk become low-hanging fruit?

Unfortunately, Mom was a cagey veteran of the jungle dangers that were Chez Parnell and had little trouble overcoming the snare traps in the hallway, the cobra in the bed and the psychotic, knife-wielding babboon in the kitchen. The desk remained with her, and the deranged longing for the antique ... rolltop ... desk remained with me for many years.

I don't know what eventually brought about Mom's decision. Maybe she remembered what she told me about handling disappointment: "When life hands you lemons, throw back grenades" and was afraid I would take that literally. But I would never have thrown grenades at Mom; I might have scratched the antique ... rolltop... desk. Perhaps she remembered what I told her when our wills clashed during my childhood: "Mom, we both know that you'll crack before I will" and had no more stomach for that kind of fight. But the why is not important here; what is important is that last year Mom called and told me the desk was mine.

(Before we go much further, I want to clear up any misconceptions you may have about my family. We're really quite normal. Sure, we may sometimes -- OK, usually -- use hugs to pat each other down for weapons, but who among the best families doesn't?)

Of course, having the antique ... rolltop ... desk was a bit more problematic than wanting it. As it was now mine, I wanted it to reflect the status and glory of its new master. So I thought about decking it out with purple neon trim and chrome drawer fronts; maybe some hyrdaulic lifts to make it bounce. You know -- give it a "Pimp My Desk" vibe. But the more I looked at the antique ... rolltop ... desk the more I took pity on it. It looked so mortified to be in the general clutter of my apartment, sort of like a Baptist minister who has inadvertently wound up judging a wet T-shirt contest at the local Suds 'n' Jugs. No, the desk should not have to change, but my apartment and its contents would.

And that meant throwing out years of clutter, which was a job that I was hesitant to do. Not for sentimental or slothful reasons, mind you. It's just that when we clear out clutter, we're doing archeological digs into ourselves. And instead of finding the spiritual equivalent of the Parthenon, we're more likely to find tacky pottery and fresoes of Elvis wrestling a tiger. I preferred to let John That Was lie buried under a heap of bad '80s albums, and leave John That Is to his blissful ignorance.

The antique ... rolltop ... desk, however, insisted that I press forward with my task. So I started with something easy: clothes. I threw nothing out. I have consistently dressed like a slob. That means I have not been gathering up clothes like a supermodel fearful of the Apocalypse.

Books were another matter. I have lots of books in my apartment, some bestsellers, some classics and some so dull that even a librarian would consign them to a roaring bonfire. For instance, I was a philosophy major in college, and I still have several of my old textbooks. But are they of any use to me now? Not really; let's face it -- the only way you're going to get people to discuss Kant's third critique at a cocktail party is if you drag them by their heels out of whatever table they dived under to avoid you. And what date hasn't been dashed upon the rocks of romance as soon as a comparison between Plato's spirited man and Kierkegaard's ethical man asserts itself?

But I just can't dump my philosophy books, nor can I cast aside the half-finished histories and half-witted novels that I bought when I was trying to be avant-garde. I can't part with any of my books. It's not that I am a hard-core bibliophile or anything else that honorable. It's that I am a show-off know-it-all. Besides, turning loose another copy of Hegel's "Phenomenolgy" might be a felony.

My old vinyl albums were another matter. They HAD to go. Having them in my apartment was like a permanent visit from my teenage self. And what was he like? Well, he listened to the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Yes, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin -- music that suggests highly questionable lifestyle choices. He seldom veered from the mainstream and even embraced REO Speedwagon. Oh, how the gods of cool must have wept when that happened. All in all, I had a record collection that should have left at the front door of the Goodwill store in the middle of the night like some bastard child in Victorian London. Or maybe I should have used it for skeet shooting.

So what did I learn after cleaning up my apartment and sifting through my past? I am a smarty-pants slob with a comically dubious past. Not exactly the sort of thing to post on eHarmony, y'know.

And if Mom wants to give me another antique, I'll know that she's REALLY out to get me.