Middle Drawer

Its spring cleaning time.

But not just the annual variety, which usually amounts to sweeping crumbs under the couch and running around with the Dirt Devil.

The long weekend kicked off an apocalyptic and antiseptic earth scorching of the apartment. Long overdue, the Machiavellian Moment had arrived. 

Tonight, the next geographical phase kicked off. In the midst of recycling the dozen or so empty protein powder jugs that camouflaged the kitchen table, I knew there was no turning back. I knew what had to come next. 

The middle drawer. The pharmaceutical graveyard.

I had been looking forward to this moment for years, yet had always postponed the assuredly cathartic event each time it crossed my mind. "Spring Cleaning 2012" was the proleptic vision.

And while, technically, I had until June 21 to carry out the deed, I took another look at the lid of the protein powder jugs, and a Popeye-fueled pragmatic sanction was imposed on the contents of the middle drawer. In order to proceed with the Spring Cleaning, the middle drawer had to be excavated and its unwelcome relics purged. 

Perversely, I felt a twinge of nostalgia as I greeted my old familiars. One by one, they were airlifted from the middle drawer into the appropriately named "earth bag". That's where they were going, one way or another.

No longer a sepulchre of the poisons and promised salves that I once eagerly consumed in order to "get better", the middle drawer yawned up at me. I had forgotten how deep it was, and how eagerly it seemed to want something new, and fresh, and good, to be put in place of the empty shells that are the casualties of biological warfare.  

There have been a number of these manufactured moments. Those temporal markers that, symbolically, and once and for all, were supposed to distance me from the Interruptnum. All of them bullshit of course, but that's what is so useful about historiographical heuristics, even when we conceitedly apply them to our own delusional and melancholic self-narratives.

But tonight, after "relocating" the contents of the middle drawer, I feel pretty good.

Tomorrow might very well be a different story.

But over the past few months, it feels like I am finally living a life again, and not rehabilitating one that could have easily slid away.