A Fungus Among Us

There's some crazy green mold stuff living off my bedroom walls, and it's starting to worry Mom. It doesn't bother me that much, although there's at least one species of mold that's the color of snot and forms little droplets on the wall, and that kind of grosses me out. I should, in fact, be very worried because our next door neighbors' house had to be torn down because of a toxic mold infestation, and I'm sure an image of the giant caution-taped off hole in the lot next door flashes in Mom's mind every time she sees the mold colonize a new section of my bedroom.

I got a spray bottle of Tilex and started taking care of the problem, but it's going to be a pretty big job because most of the mold is living behind boxes of crap I brought home from college ten months ago and never put away. It's not that I'm lazy, it's that... well, okay, I'm lazy. But I also don't have anyplace to put all the crap from college because all of my closets and drawers and shelves are filled with crap I brought home from high school four years and ten months ago and never threw away. So today's going to be the day I take all the stuff out of my closet, dust it off, look at it one last time... and put it in a big plastic box down in the basement where it'll sit for fifteen years. There's precedent for this: the G.I. Joe action figures (ahem! dolls! cough, cough!) Harold Burwell gave me for that birthday party where my parents made me invite my entire kindergarten class, a Sesame Street record player, enough Legos™ to build a scale model of Dallas, and something called Legions of Power whose logo makes it look even gayer than the name "Legions of Power" would suggest:

You never know what you'll find rummaging through your closet — aside from dust, you can be pretty sure you'll find dust. I discovered the "portable" typewriter Mom brought with her to college. In case you're young, a "typewriter" is a mechanical device old people who are afraid of computers use to type up papers, like a quill pen or a stylus and clay tablet. Now that I've unearthed Mom's old typewriter, we have two in our house. I found an unopened Lion King paint-by-numbers kit, which I can't possibly imagine myself buying. I found all of European history in outline form, which could conceivably come in handy someday.

Those last six words there — could conceivably come in handy someday — are going to be my downfall. There are companies in New York that folks hire to de-pack rat their homes because they've accumulated decades and decades worth of junk in their tiny studio apartments, every last scrap of which could conceivably come in handy someday. Who knows? Maybe someday, I'm on Jeopardy! and the answer is "Who is Metternich?" or "What was the Glorious Revolution?" and I'll be kicking myself for not having rescued those AP Euro notes from the basement.

Come to think of it, even that "Legions of Power" eighties spaceship thing could come in handy someday. On Ebay.

Nope, I checked Ebay, probably not. 8-(