Digging Deep Just Before Sleep

We don't have the ability to travel through time, or at least we can't do that in any true, meaningful way. I've never been much for the notion of traveling forward in real time, or in the idea of the planet Earth as being a spacecraft of sorts. Those are cop-outs. Still, there are those things that feel like space travel, or like I began, like time travel. Opening a time capsule is something like that, if we assume that the past was damp and moldy.

My work area here in the "home office" is like traveling through time. I have a square table in one corner bracketed by two computer desks (which are for my laptop and desktop). Each of the three pieces of furniture enumerated becomes covered in layers of detritus of varying origins and grades of value. The whole space becomes like an archaeological dig, with strings and markers demarcating alone the lines of the above categories.

The items found are largely trash, and this encompasses everything from useless scraps of paper to bits of unidentifiable plastic. There are also items from other rooms that found their way to my desk for a period of momentary need but never got back home. Now, the time travel bit comes in with anything marked by a date or a vague place in time that I can call forth from my memory. I can work my way back, layer by layer, and it lends some pleasantness to the cleaning.

That is not to say that I clean too much. I have just gone over the area and cleared away a lot now. Nothing spurs me to clean more than the intention of writing. I don't know how non-writers get anything like cleaning done without something more pressing to abandon in favor of it. I have to get the idea that there's no way of writing a few jokes of dubious quality without a clean, ordered workspace. I then half-ass some cleaning and get on my way with an idea of what to write about as my reward.